Our summer is slowly filling up with speaking engagements, summer camps, VBS weeks, and meetings although there is still room for a lot more. Now and then it seems a tad overwhelming when things start to overlap and I worry about the week-after-week of it, but then I remember what I'll be doing, what I'll be talking about, and suddenly the stress of it doesn't seem so worrisome. I'm certainly not a public speaker by any means but I've found that when I'm telling people about France (and much of Europe in general), the nervousness goes out the window. I nearly cried once talking about it and I'm very anti letting myself cry in public (and certainly not while speaking in front of people!). I suppose this in a way reinforces why we're doing what we're doing and how much it matters to us.
This weekend we got the chance to go to Fort Necessity and learn a little more about what happened there during the French & Indian War and how it impacted much of Europe. We spent some time reflecting on this after and pondering the what-ifs: if the French would have won, if Braddock would have been better informed, if Washington's translator would have done a better job, if a real treaty would have been made with the American Indian tribes (and honered). All this brings me around to another installment of why studying history is so important when trying to understand another culture. This Crash Course World History video best explains some of the tension that led to France's revolution as well as how it forged some of the integral values of the French: