Time Apart

This morning I left my family at 4:00am and headed out of town with a few fellas for an long vacation weekend. A couple times a year my family splits up, sometimes it's me heading to a conference, sometimes it's Stacy heading to see her family in Chicago, sometimes it's both.
Regardless of who is leaving and who is staying I always lead our family in the same basic prayer before departure. The prayer is never limited to this, but always consists of at least these couple phrases. "God please help us to miss each other, think of each other often, and not do anything that would compromise our relationship with Jesus or each other while we are apart.". I then will personalize it depending on what the purpose of the trip is.
I started doing this years ago so that we all keep in mind that while we might be away from each other the decisions we make still affect each other. As I prayed with the boys and Shaye last night and Stacy this morning it allowed God the opportunity to keep fresh in our minds that we are still unified in our collective efforts to cultivate our relationship with Him and each other even when divided by geography.
If you don't do this already I encourage you to give it a try, in my opinion it makes our time apart much better than it would be otherwise.