I remember thinking as a youngster that I had a terrific family and if I wished hard enough, my life with them would go on forever. I could not imagine living without them.

Neither could I have imagined the serenity I would experience while traveling with them in the Pacific Northwest one summer in the 1970s. It’s a sweet memory that flooded back this week as I stood on the beautiful Whidbey Island shoreline to contemplate my 50th birthday and where life has taken me since that memorable trip.

It was a camping adventure that included my parents and brother. There to round out the group was my great Uncle Loren, the elder statesman, his younger brother Charlie, and my grandmother–their baby sister.

It’s a treasured gift to think back on their weathered faces smiling back at me. It is still sweeter to recall our interactions that included story telling, humor, and the simple joy that comes from being outside, observing new places, and eating pancakes at a picnic table so moist that your bottom gets uncomfortably damp unless you sit on a towel.

It was a memorable trip. My Uncle Charlie ran into the girl who had written him a Dear John letter 50 years before while he served our nation in the armed forces. She and her husband were folding clothes in a laundromat when they caught sight of each other. We watched bears stride through a campground and made a list of each wildflower we observed because Grandmother loved them so.

Beyond the adventure, God was beginning to mold my understanding of family life. He began teaching me about its irreplaceable value on that trip. He knew that I would one day turn 50, stand on a beautiful Northwest shoreline, and find a way to be strengthened by the experience even though four of them would be in heaven and the other two living thousands of miles away.

Uncle Charlie died first, back at his home in Texas. Uncle Loren attended my wedding in 1981, bought me an egg poacher because he said every young bride needs one, and returned home to pass away at age 90 within a matter of weeks. Grandmother would remain the last person alive in her family until 1997 when the call from Charlie and Loren would sound sweeter than ours here on earth. Dad would receive their welcome in 2006.

But the beauty of family, clan, network and tribe lives on in me. I observed it next when I joined a church youth group. We played together, prayed, cried and laughed together. Among that group of teens, God moved in and dwelled within us because we asked Him to. Eventually we parted to attend college, marry, work and build adult lives. But we also took God’s lessons and His spirit right along with us.

A fuller understanding of family continued when I moved here to Whidbey Island, far from my childhood home and its comfortable structure, to create family from a community of people who were once strangers.

I’ve learned that when you need someone to hold you accountable to exercise on a daily basis, you stop resenting the fact that your lives thousands of miles away. Instead, you recreate sisterhood with women who choose to exercise as well.

I’ve learned that when you start a new job, you join the lunch crowd because one day they will be your work family.

I’ve learned that the neighbor down the road who teaches you how to carefully pick wild mushrooms, harvest Penn Cove muscles at low tide, and playfully grills each special friend your child brings home to meet the family is in all ways your brother and their loving uncle.

In half a century one of the best lessons I’ve learned is this: We’re surrounded by family. Let’s take care of each other.