Around the House

One of my favorite things about our house is the massive, old magnolia in the backyard.  The blooms smell so good this time of year!

The plastic owl is our newest weapon in the war against the chipmunks.  Not sure if it is working or not yet.  Milly sure is afraid of it.

Flowers on the dining room table & a picture of our bathroom.  I’m not sure why.  I love the pink tile. Also, our Pier One desk.

Our dining room fan is apparently the best place to dry bike jerseys.  I love it.  I wouldn’t know I was at home if there weren’t bike jerseys & spandex onesies hanging from the fans.

In All Things

In a Worldmag.com commentary  titled “Christian Contentment,” Marvin Olasky writes:

“The key is to understand that everything is a gift from God and that, since Eden, thorns and thistles hinder everything we do. Starting from an entitlement perspective, all difficulties are undeserved. Starting from an awareness of sin, all good things are undeserved.”

And the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica:

“In all things give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

Last month during Brent’s hospitalization, I had a moment of clarity unlike anything I have ever experienced before. I was on the elevator, headed home to sleep while Brent slept in a bed on the seventh floor, leg with the vein-clots propped up on pillows.  A woman got on the elevator with me at the sixth floor and I could tell that she was absolutely exhausted.  We made small talk while the elevator went down, and when she asked, I told her my husband had been on the seventh floor for going on one week. She shared that it had been four weeks for her husband this time, two years since a random act of violence claimed his health and changed their lives forever. 

I walked to the car imagining twenty-eight days of the double-life, wife and nurse, holding it together at home and at the hospital.  After four weeks, did it start to feel normal? After four weeks, was it still absolutely agonizing to leave your husband in a hospital bed and return to sleep alone in a house that no longer felt like a home? I felt exposed and ashamed of the self-pity I had indulged over the past several days.  

The doctors all said that Brent would be fine, would recover completely and return to our home-sweet-home with the pine kitchen and the pink tile bathroom in a matter of days. Truthfully, this hospital stay was merely an inconvenience, an added burden, a hiccup in our respective schedules. Just minutes before I stepped on the elevator, he had given me a kiss and a hug and we laughed in our usual way about -- oh, I can’t remember what. But what if it was his fourth week too and we didn’t have this certainty and hope? What if he was suffering? What if I faced the possibility that we might never again lie together in the dark, side-by-side on the sheets with red posies and two pugs tucked in too? I really hadn’t thought of that.

There is so much to be thankful for that we don’t even know about. Sure,  I often look at my life and count blessing upon blessing, but these are only the apparent ones. The reality is that every single moment is packed full of tiny miracles and as long as I am alive I have an infinite number of reasons to give thanks in all things - for Brent and hope and health and grace and that even a bad situation is never as bad as it could be. For Christ and the mercy that makes everything else only icing on the cake and far more than I deserve. How easily I forget that I should not be striving for mere contentment, but for crazy joy everyday and relentless gratitude in everything. As a Christian, there is simply no other way to live.

And so I am picking up where I left off:

#12  sunrise at the river

#13 physical therapy (and pugs that try to help)

 

#14 peaches (and peach cobbler!)

#15  church cookbooks

#16  extra fuses for the air conditioner

#17  Mama’s recipes

#18  neighbors

#19  pink skies

#20  an evening rain shower when the heat index is 104 degrees…..at 6:30 p.m.!

 

Wrapping it Up

I almost lost it today. 

The Explorer at the shop, Christmas wrapping and gifts yet-to-be-wrapped were strewn all over the house, and I had an endless list of errands, including a trip to the vet with Oscar, which is never a pleasant experience.  And the phone, the phone. 

It was just one of those days – I realized after I was at the cash register that I had forgotten my coupon, and the line at the post office was 8 deep when I walked in the door. When I got back from the vet, Milly had made a mess in the kitchen and as I scrubbed the ceramic tile on my knees, the gas alarm went off, so shrill, and kept going off.  The doorbell rang, the postman delivering a stack of mail to the door. Where did those cans in the yard come from?

Hair appointment at 3:30 and at 3:40 I’m circling the parking lot; can’t find a spot in the shopping chaos.  Frustrated. I felt my anxiety rising and kept thinking of how this isn’t what I had envisioned when I took the day off from work.   I had envisioned reading, relaxing, watching Christmas movies, listening to Handel’s Messiah and The Nutcracker Suite while baking, enjoying time off from work, enjoying the anticipation of Christmas.

It is a good thing I know the antidote to all of this stress, all of this anxiety, all of this frustration.  But why do I wait so late to use it?

“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

-Psalm 118:24

When I want to scream, or cry, or maybe both, I count.  Counting blessings, counting gifts. Giving thanks to God.  With the mind first, and then the heart,  engaged in intentional gratitude, it is impossible to be sour and bitter and frustrated. The counting is a new thing, formally, but something I have been doing informally for the past several months, after reading about it on one of my favorite Christian blogs.  I don’t have any “rules,” but I try to count the things that are special today, in the moment  if possible , and I try to be as specific as possible. The blog is the perfect place to keep track of this, so here goes…..

1000 Gifts

1. A cozy home

2. A sweet husband who calls to check on me throughout the day

3. pugs

4. Christmas lights

5. Gifts under the tree

6. A car that works (and is paid for)

7. New telephones that work

8. December sunshine

9. comfy sweatshirts

10. Roma tomatoes

11. Backyard stargazing with Brent

I came home with tacos and highlights and we ate together.  Church visitors dropped by and brought a book: Strobel’s The Case for Christmas.  And when I look back on it, as a whole, maybe the day wasn’t so bad after all.

For more information on counting 1000 Gifts:

Gratitude Community