Blessings

My back hurts, my arms hurt, my legs hurt, and my feet hurt, but all in all, I'm a happy individual today. My house is clean, my floor is done, and Christmas can finally begin! I haven't blogged in over two weeks, and there are so many random ideas I've wanted to address, but I've been pondering on how to do that. Well, I've realized that all in all, these are things that I am just thankful for...so we will address them all that way!

1. Let's start with my car, Mithral Rae. Even though we did have to shell out a couple of hundred dollars to get the sensors fixed, she is at least working again, quite nicely, and seems to not have any inclinations towards randomly quitting her job in the middle of the road! We are going to find a way to get the more general repairs done on her sometime in the next few months; she’s been such a good car over the last ten years, I hate to give her up!

2. Thanksgiving was one of the best Thanksgivings we have had in several years. We drove down about ten hours to Texas to spend it with Chris' aunt and uncle and their four vivacious children. We had a lovely time with delicious food, drives around the city (which I love!), cuddling kids, expressions of thankfulness (including a surprise announcement from Chris' aunt about kidlet number five coming in June!), and just a general relaxing, cozy, thankful! Thanksgiving. We were both in desperate need of escaping Springfield (and our house) for awhile, and to be able to do so with loving and accepting people was wonderful.

3. Dishwasher updates. Upon returning to Springfield, we found our kitchen floor was almost completely done being tiled, and indeed, as I write this, not only is our kitchen floor completely done, but this weekend we finished redoing the dining room floor, putting in dividers, and (this is the reason for the sore muscles) completely cleaning up the disgusting dirtiness that my home had turned into! (I spent 6.5 hours just doing the cleaning. Keep in mind, our kitchen, dining room, and living have been one big jumbled mess for over four weeks, and, as with any construction project, dust has been getting everywhere. Add into that the fact that I’ve been sick, we’ve been out of town, and it’s really difficult to keep a clean house when nothing is in its right place and it’s constantly getting dustier because of grout, tile, sawdust, etc).

Our home is now sparkly clean, ready to be decorated for Christmas, and the kitchen/dining room actually look better with the tile in the kitchen than they did before all this happened!

One of the most amazing parts of all this is how faithful God is in taking care of our needs. When we were first debating on how to fix our floor from the great dishwasher flood, we decided we would have to tile the kitchen floor rather than simply replacing the laminate because the particular brand of laminate we originally used in flooring was - of course – discontinued. And, while we did have some extra boxes of laminate left-over from when we original put the laminate in the house, we were going to be just short in being able to redo both the kitchen and dining room.

Dreading the cost of tile (and losing our beautiful floor), Chris and I went out hunting. We finally found what we wanted and brought it home only to decide it really wasn’t right. At that moment, my dear brother dropped off a whole bunch of tiles at our house that go beautifully with our kitchen and were given to him (boxes and boxes and boxes) by a hardware store because most of the boxes had chipped pieces in them. Cobble them together - and we had enough to redo our kitchen. So, even counting what we paid my brother to do the tiling on the floor (a topic both of us were completely clueless about), all in all it cost us maybe $250 to fix all of the mess. Plus a few weeks of frustration - but hey - considering what we thinking it could cost...it's a blessing. God really does take care of our every need - large and small.

4. Tied directly in with the idea of a clean home is another cleansing concept. For the last three months, Chris and I have been embroiled in a nasty, sad, and at time rather pathetic situation with his immediate family. This has been a long time building (years literally) and involves some odd issues. While I won’t get into details about any of that here, the basic upshot is that – as far as we can tell – his family is no longer talking to him (us) and they seem to have no inclination to try to work through any of what has happened – and indeed, seem to have moved on in their lives to the point where we really don’t know if they will ever have an interest in reforming any kind of relationship with us again.

Obviously, this is a hard place for anybody to be. Acceptance by the people who are your family is a basic desire of any person, no matter how good or bad their parents may be. It’s the reason one can find children who’s parents abuse them who will stand up for their parents.

There is so much involved in all of this mess that I really don’t feel comfortable discussing it in such a public forum as this. However, the result from our end has been three very emotionally frustrating and even depressing months. In getting to this point of realizing that we may or may not ever have a healthy relationship with his family, we have spent many hours processing and analyzing and – vital of all – praying. We have finally hit the point where we have to move on – with or without them. We have to put our lives back together again. It is sad that things are the way they are, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives wondering if they will ever turn into reasonable, caring people.

And so, for both of us, restoring the physical peace of our home from the chaos and mess that has overtaken it, can be seen as a symbolic representation of what we are doing with our emotional and mental selves.

So where does the thankfulness come in?I am thankful to be married to a man who is willing to give up a lot of important things in order to not only become a better man but to develop his own faith and beliefs. I am thankful for his humility and willingness to be honest about his own life.

I am thankful that we have not had to walk through all this alone, but that we have had friends who have been willing to pray with us and put up with our rather chaotic emotions for several months.

I am thankful that God has so clearly demonstrated to us – over and over again – the last few months how much control He has over our lives and that He is always taking care of things – no matter how bad or how frustrating.

And, I am thankful that, somehow, in all of this, I know that everything will be okay in the end. Maybe not what we would ideally want, but God will be with us and we will be okay.