Turkey, Football, Lights, & Trees.....

The Holidays are here and I couldn't be more excited. I look forward to November and December all year long and every year it goes by faster and faster. I wish I had a pause button I could push at all my favorite parts so that they could just stop long enough for me to take it all in. I have realized that with 3 kids I am always going to miss something. There is not enough of me to fully experience each event with each child. I grew up in a house where tradition reigned supreme! Every holiday had it's own set of traditions and they were never broken!!!(well, almost never) If my mother or father tried to do something "new" they would feel the wrath! Oh my poor poor parents.....how they tried to move the Christmas tree to a different room of the house, or thought it was a good idea to stay home for Thanksgiving instead of going to Bakersfield or when we didn't get calendar's with our stockings. To you these may seem like harmless things, but to us, it was a colossal travesty. I love tradition, it makes my world happy :) I know exactly what to expect, I look forward to these things in life that are exactly the same year in and year out. That is so rare these days, to have things stay the same. Our lives are riddled with change and I hate change so of course I love our traditions that NEVER change. Ok I may be a little OCD about it but it's who I am. I have had the daunting task of trying to come up with new traditions with my husband and our kids. I want them to be just as special as mine were when I was a kid. But slowly we have come up with our family traditions and I see my kids getting excited. This just makes me overjoyed!!!! I dreamed about my kids and how they would be growing up and to see them happy and healthy and loving life just makes me feel so blessed. I try to teach my kids that the holidays are not about what you get from people but the time you spend with your family and the memories that you make. The toys and that stuff, they will break and get lost and lose their fun; but the memories, the laughs, the love; that will never ever leave you. The Lord has blessed us so abundantly and I praise Him for the family I have. I pray that each one of you has a Holiday season full of love, laughs, and great memories.

Thankful

I have been thinking about thankfulness alot lately. I think when November comes around it's tradition for me to start thinking about how thankful I am for the many blessings in my life. Throughout the 10 years Ivan and I have been married, thankfulness was not always my strong point I have to admit. There were alot of years that I focused solely on the things that I didn't have and how my life could be better. The Lord took me down a tough road to show me all that I had to be thankful for. 3 years ago I can remember picking up a book entitled "Surrender" by Nancy Leigh DeMoss to read for a small group I was in. I didn't know what was about to hit me when I opened that pretty little purple book. The first time I picked it up to read it I only got maybe 2 pages in and threw the book across the room and swore to never pick it up again. Can you tell I had a little bit of an issue????? Now I can laugh about it, but then I really struggled. Here is an excerpt from "Surrender" that I really love :

When it comes to uncertanties that keep us from sacrafice, surrender, and slavery to God, we, like Abraham, have "exceedingly great and precious promises" from God's Word-promises that powerfully counteract our deepest fears. If we trust those promises and the God who has made them, we will be given courage to make each sacrafice He asks of us. If we do not trust God's promises and, therefore, do not step out in faith and surrender, we will ultimately find ourselves in bodage to the very things we refuse to surrender. We will end up being controlled by that which we are seeking to keep within our own control.

You may be thinking what does that have to do with being thankful??? Well, for me it went hand in hand. I couldn't truely be thankful until I surrendered all of my wants and needs to the Lord. Not that I have perfected that ;) But 3 years has gone by since I first read that book and it has a profound affect on me still. I have learned to be thankful for all the small things in my life and for the big things. There will always be things in our lives that could be better and there will always be things that I think I "need" but ultimately God knows best. He wants the best for me!!!! That is one of his precious promises!!!!!! Not one day has gone by that I don't thank the Lord for my home, my husband, my kids, my cars, my church, my family, my friends. There will always be someone out there who has more than me and there will always be someone out there who has less than me. I am sooooo happy to be in a place where I am content with what the Lord has blessed me with. I don't ever want to repeat the road it took to get here but I am BLESSED!!!!!

"This is the day the Lord hath made, I will rejoice and be glad in it!"