Thankful Reflections

I have been inspired this last week by so many people. Kimberly and Holly and their maturity and joy for my family and life seemed to make me just want to be a better person. My friend Amy from high school who is walking through tough stuff but taking one step at a time. My friend Dan who, I will be the first to say I am SO glad that he is blogging again. And a friend of my roommate from college who each day is posting what she is finding in her day to be thankful for right now.

For about a month or more now I have wanted to communicate in writing more and more and have felt stuck. I realized this week in a quiet moment after reading THIS BLOG by Dan that God is giving me so much in the here and now to do to serve people and Him. Yet I am such a big grandiose, love to see major things, massive dreamer that I really do seem to epitomize 'Go Big or Go Home.' (which makes every Kiwi want to throw up, but heck it's who I am at the core of my being) I have been like that my whole life. I didn't just get hurt as a kid, I got electrocuted so badly that they were surprised I wasn't severely hurt or dead. I didn't just play house as a kid, I played "disaster house." Playing house was too boring, I needed to save people from a disaster in order to make house fun. Seriously?!?!? God mad me with this insatiable desire for adventure and drama.

So, now as I sit at home feeding a baby every three hours that takes 40 or more minutes to feed my life can feel quite mundane or boring, yet in all that sitting I am dreaming up what I want to do. I have thought of about a million ideas including moving to Fiji and reading books to poor kids because I just heard a study where kids who are read to as a child before the age of 5 will have exponentially higher rates of success not only in school but COLLEGE! Most poor kids are deemed as never making it to college but this study saw that just by one simple act of reading books to kids at night can change poverty. Again....I have a three month old. Not saying that we can't do all my grandiose ideas, but I think God might be doing something entirely different in me.

I think He is calling me to the here and now. Which, quite frankly, I SUCK AT! The other day I made myself stop and let Max sleep on me so I could choose the here and now and not be into the million things I thought I needed to do. I have one shot at each day with Max and before I know it he will be running out the door with his friends and not really needing me for food...well he is a boy so maybe he will always need me for food, but you get my point!

After reading that blog of Dan's and reflecting on that and Dorina's Thankful Posts on Facebook every day, I decided to make a choice to stop holding on so tightly to what I thought life was supposed to look like and enjoy and dive into the life in front of me. Novel idea right? Well, for this active dreamer it was a turning point. I looked at the opportunities in my life already: The plunket nurse asked me to arrange a mom's group for women in my area which I already have had a chance to start, Sam's good friend from high school invited me to a mom's group at her church and I actually made myself go and enjoyed it and then had that friend share some really hard news and I got to be a friend to her when she really needed one....talk about so glad I chose to get over my "they aren't Americans and I am nervous" attitude! My husband and kiddo love being a part of the family we are creating and as a mom and wife I get to be apart of setting the tone in the house for so much of our interaction and memory building. And BIG ONE HERE....I can blog all I want!!! No one is holding a gun to my head saying "stop communicating."

So off I go into blogging more to share my heart, chronicle our story and I trust allow God to use the gifts He gave me to speak to and encourage those who read it.

I am beyond thankful for the INTERNET today. It has given me a place to stay connected of course to those in the States, but it has also been a place for God to speak to me through a variety of different people. Community is a weird thing and at the end of the day I think God's heart is connecting people to people and to Himself and for me the Internet does that on a daily basis!