Giving thanks for a first month

I have been working for one entire month now.  I won't lie, the transition has been HARD.  Still we accomplished the goal of not crying last week (both me and Isabelle) and today I am sitting outside enjoying a perfect 4th of July afternoon while getting paid.  Amazing.

I am sure we will continue to transition throughout the summer but I am happy to report that I can now stay up past 9pm, our freezer is full of potential dinners, Isabelle lets me out the door in the morning without much fanfare, I am starting to understand my job and the people I work with are all extremely nice.

All change can be hard but there is still so much to be thankful for:

• After a month of rain and clouds the sun has found Minnesota!
• A beautiful wall of windows to look out every day.
• Sitting in front of a gorgeous limestone countertop all day long.
• A really great boss who knows what needs to get done but is casual and laid back like me.
• Patient co-workers teaching me the ropes.
• Morning snuggles on the couch with my little girl.
• Family willing to spend time with Isabelle regularly while I work.
• Cousins who are friends (mine and my kids)
• A husband who steps up to help out as I transition.
• Working air conditioner and a quick response repair man.
• Years at home to create memories with my daughter and son.
• Being a parent for 17 years to a wonderful young man.
• A 34 on the ACT.  Yes he is a genius.
• Morning runs
• The community 4th of July parade.
• Loosing the winter white hanging at the lake.
• Dental insurance and comprehensive health insurance.  Lots of doctor appointments will be made this week!

 

Gratitude

This weekend I was at our church women's retreat.  I have planned the last 2 retreats although I am a master delegator so I really just oversee the planning which is exactly what my bossy first born personality likes to do.  I get bored with the details.

I had asked 3 women from our church, all of whom had lived and ministered internationally, to speak to us on the concept of mission in our daily lives and asked them to try and give us a global point of view on the topic.  It was wonderful and they were all wonderful and I came home having been ministered to as I shared my burdens with other women and recieved the prayer and encouragement I needed to continue the ministry God has given me right here as I live my life.

One of the women who spoke was my friend Mwende whose family lives in Kenya and organized our trip to Kenya in 2009 and the ministry work we did while we were there.  She shared in her talk about how someone from our team (If it wasn't me it could have been so I will say it was me) said that I got so much out of the trip and didn't feel like I gave to the people of Kitui, the village we were in, nearly as much as I got out of the trip.  Mwende then shared a wonderful story that I just knew I had to share with all of you.

This past week a pastor from Massachsetts had been in Kenya and spoken at the church in Kitui.  The next day, early in the morning, there was a knock on her parents door and there stood 4 elderly women holding chickens under their arms with their feet tied.  When you are traveling in Kenya you may want to bring a chicken with you to give The feet are tied in order for you to bring the chicken on the bus when you travel.  A chicken is an important gift because it can mean a way for you to feed yourself.  These women announced that they knew this pastor had been from the U. S. and they wanted him to bring these chickens back to the visitors that had come to the village to thank us because they didn't feel they had gotten a chance to do so.

Here we are coming up on 2 years later and they are still grateful for what we did and I am still feeling like I didn't really do anything.

What I am struck by is that my first thought is how I can send something there and do more for them.  I feel guilty that they want to express their gratitude to me and so respond by wanting to do something more.  Something to actually deserve this experssion of gratitude because I am sure I do not.

Why can't I just accept this expression of thanks?

As I have thought a lot about gratitude and being grateful this past year linking up with Ann's blog occasionally on Mondays I was struck this weekend by the other side of gratitude, recieving it.  I must admit that as woman after woman thanked me for putting the retreat together this weekend my continual response was to deny my role and tell them I did nothing and didn't deserve the thanks. 

Why couldn't I just accept their thanks?

I am honored by the opportunities I have had to serve God in smalls ways over the years and am humbled by the thanks I have receieve from the people I have served.  Lord, give me the grace to recieve their thanks.

And I continue to give thanks to God:

• a community of women to share my life with.
• a fellowship of wise women to learn and grow from.
• the opportunities to share my burdons and share the burdons of others so that we may all lighten our loads.
• Beautiful spring weather.
• A gentle wind and chirping birds as we do morning prayer together.
• blue nail polish.
• time to create a work of art and a process that doesn't require me to be an artist to do so.
• New friends and deeper relationships.
• Beauty
• Variety
• Complements and grateful women.

Everyday Gratitude

Do you ever get the feeling God is trying to tell you something?  Lately I feel like the phrase "gratitude" and lessons about it are all around me.  One day I read a blog reviewing the book "Choosing Gratitude".  I was thinking it sounded like something interesting to pick up.  I then went to another blog the same day where the writer was making a list of things she was thankful for as a result of reading another blog about a Gratitude Community.  Among other things it had encouraged her to begin a list of 1000 things she is grateful for this year.  So at this point gratitude is rolling around in my head.  I am organizing the speakers for our women's retreat and was asking one of the women on the team what might be a good topic, she suggested Thankfulness.  I knew right away that had to be a topic and asked someone to speak on it.  I am looking forward to hearing what she has to say.  Finally, I was picking Isabelle up from her Wednesday night church and was handed a flyer about a mom's event they were hosting with Speaker/writer Susie Larson speaking on her new book, "Growing Grateful Kids."  It seemed pretty clear I needed to go.

It is funny how you can feel like an entire area of your life has been neglected.  Not that I would have told you I lacked gratitude, or that I don't teach my children to be grateful but when I look at life from the specific perspective of seeing or not seeing gratitude in my life I realize I could be doing better.

My highlights of her talk:

Model Thankfulness--How often am I clearly grateful, specifically grateful to God on a daily basis?  Not nearly as often as I would like to be. 

Practice Restraint--She talked about looking for things that have a stronghold in your life, that are taking the place of God in your life.  How often do we not appreciate all we have and fill the void in our lives with things or time on computer or whatnot rather than going to God.  If she noticed something was beging to have a strongold in her life she would fast from it for a week or two, afterward she found it never had the grip on her that it originally had.  I have found this to be true in my life as well.  After going a few months without sugar a few years ago I suddenly lost my taste for pop, something that had always been important to me.  And at the beginning of this year I spent a week off the computer.  While I still think I am sitting here too much I definately feel like its grip is weaker as I see how else my life could be structured.

Take Time to Play--This one particularly struck me.  As we have had financial ups and downs over the past several years I sometimes feel like a fraud.  I have a hard time enjoying fun activities because I think I don't deserve them.  Some days I feel like I should be living in a trailer park eating beany weany's not standing at the park chatting with my neighbors as if I didn't have a care in the world.  Yet she makes the point that it all rests on God's shoulders not mine and so I am free to play and have fun.  This is exactly where God has put me right now.

Teach Forgiveness--I felt pretty good about this one and didn't take alot of notes but some bullet points were: pray daily for those you can't forgive, recieve fresh mercy's daily, ask God where you are wrong, ask kids for forgiveness when you are wrong, walk through forgiveness.

Give a blessing--She is deliberate about speaking blessings over her children.  We shouldn't assume our children know who they are and where they are strong.  We need to see their potential and tell them.  She also talks about truth telling.  Don't tell your children they are the best at everything.  When they go off into the real world and find out they are not it will be quite an adjustment for them.  We need to be real with them.  She also encouraged her children to give blessings and truth telling to each other during periodic family times.

So what to do with all this information?  Well at the moment I am rolling it all around in my head along with teaching Isabelle about the Lord.  Jake had such a sensitve heart for the Lord from a very young age.  It was so easy to teach him about Christ.  Yet Isabelle doesn't have that same sensitivity and the methods I used to mentor Jake in his faith are clearly not what Isabelle needs.  I am wondering if my opportunity to introduce God to Isabelle will be through creating an awareness of all He does for us each day and thanking Him for it.  Learning to appreciate how we are blessed in every day life no matter what happens, good or bad.  And in teaching her I bet I just might teach myself as well.