Count your blessings!

I've been having myself a really good time this morning counting my blessings. I truly do have much to be thankful for, and every day that list only grows and grows. I thought it might be fun to "share" our blessings a bit on my blog. I would love to "hear" your blessings too so if you would like to please either leave a comment to this post or email me and I'll post yours anonymously ...... nothing tickles me more than talking about the wonderful things the Lord does for HIS children.

Here are mine (this is NOT a complete list and in no particular order of importance):

• I have a nice sturdy home to live in that the Lord lowered the rent on so that we could live here. We are able to keep our house warm in a manner that we can afford . Our home is far enough out of town that we can keep our critters, have our garden and still only be a ten minute drive from our church!

• I am much healthier now than I have been in years and years and it is only because the Lord has blessed me. I still have some bad days from time to time but they are far fewer and farther between than in the past. The Lord has helped me in finding ways to improve my overall health and manage my disorder (neurological and involving my heart) without a bunch of nasty and expensive medicines and doctors visits. Not only has my health improved dramatically but our entire family is healthier now.

• Me and my sweet Hunk 'O Honey are happier and more in love now than we ever thought we could be. The Lord has healed our marriage and restored what we had nearly destroyed. If the Lord had not intervened in our lives we would certainly have gone our separate ways and farther out into sin and ultimately would have destroyed our family..... but God in His goodness touched our broken hearts and now half the time we are as bad as newlyweds! I'm so thankful that the Lord has worked in our marriage and I pray that it just keeps getting sweeter as the years pass.

• My kids are healthy and strong and they love the Lord. The times of fellowship that the kids and I have in studying our Bibles just gets sweeter and better as they grow. We've been studying Psalm 84 and have found the blessings there to be so rich that we've just stayed there all week long. The kids have even decided to commit that Psalm to memory and have worked on it all week.

• Though our budget is still tight our needs are always met..... sometimes in sudden and totally unexplainable ways! I needed to go to the doctor this week but knew that the cost of the office visit alone would mean not being able to pay one of the bills. After agonizing and nearly driving myself nutso I drove to the doctor's office and received my FREE visit! With no explanation there was NO CHARGE for the office visit!

• From the things like the doctor's visit which was fairly important to me to the smallest details of my day the Lord meets our needs. Just a couple of weeks ago we were running really low on groceries and I had run completely out of sugar and had just not been able to find the time to go to the store. The very same day that I had run out I was pouting because I knew I would have to get up the next morning and start my day with yucky black coffee instead of my mildly sweetened version that I love. That night someone left sacks of groceries on my steps and in them was a bag of sugar!

• The kid's business has done so well that they've sold out of most everything they had! (They will be restocking and moving to a different site soon) They were able to meet their goal of purchasing enough sugar to feed all 3 hives of bees through the winter months and enough of some supplies to get started in the spring with increasing their hives. They have learned A LOT about dealing with people and how to handle losses (some folks did rip them off) and they've learned more about business than I ever thought they would (conversations about "costs of goods sold" and "return on investment" and "product development" are common now).

• Our church and church family are a HUGE blessing to us and it's one of the things that we are most thankful for on a daily basis. I remember so well when we first came here how foreign it felt to us to be under this kind of preaching but now I am so thankful for the preaching of the truth and the fellowship that we have in our church! Church family truly describes our church and I pray that it always stays that way. In all the churches that I've ever been to or visited this is only the second one where the people there truly love and care for one another like a family..... it's sad but true that too many churches are too caught up in their programs and cluttered up busyness to really take the time to love each other the way they should. I'm so very thankful for our church, it's stand on the truth, the fellowship of the people there, and most of all the presence of the Lord there and I pray that all of those things get richer and deeper this coming year!

• I'm thankful that I can look back over the year that's almost over now and see so many answers to prayer and sometimes it seems as though I could just see the hand of the Lord touching my life the way my hands touch bread dough to knead it and shape the loaves or rolls.... just that kind of woven through full contact touching and I'm thankful for that.
  

I have so many more things that I'm thankful for like good friends and neighbors and Troy's job and other things but my blogging time is over (awhile ago). I'm thankful for having so many blessings that I can't count them all in writing for lack of time! Please do share your blessings too...... I love to hear how the Lord blesses other people too!