So what was your favorite Christmas gift? Chocolate...yeah that always ranks up there on my list too. However as I pondered Christmas and the days leading up to it and all the happenings and activity surrounding the season I quickly came to realize that I get to open Christmas gifts every day of the year.
My kids are gifts. yes they can be messy gifts, noisy gifts with little to no volume control but goodness gracious they are GIFTS. I want to enjoy them. I want to invest in them because it is the only thing that my heart seems to find true value in.
Each day my gifts are growing up and therefore away from me one day at a time. My own mom used to ask me to sit on her lap when I was a teenager and I just thought...really you want me to CRUSH you like that? But now as a mom myself I know what she was doing...she wanted to hold me while she could...even if my knife slicing elbows were cutting into her sides. These are my gifts...growing up. I don't want to miss this!
Someday I will look back on my life and not remember what I received for Christmas 2013, but I will remember our anticipation of God coming as a baby boy. I will remember our whispers of "God is coming" and I will remember hearing my 6 year old sing about his King and Creator being "HERE". I will remember our lovely or not white board with the names of Jesus on it. I hope I will be able to remember their laughter, the light in their eyes, their anticipation of Christmas.
Because if I never receive another gift in my life I am "all good" for I have been given four gifts from God himself. Four gifts that I intend to fully enjoy day by day, help to grow and change the world.
We are making 2014 our year of 1000 gifts--being thankful even with the small and sometimes hard things of life. Trying to get the boys to see that there is always something good if we look hard enough. No scratch that. There is always something good if we DON'T MISS IT. I am convinced that more of our lives pass by with us not noticing. This is our year to name those easy to miss gifts and rejoice in them as we count them.
So far we have: baby slobber (the gift is that if you have baby slobber all over you that means there are babies around!!) and that oats winter kill (meaning it has been cold enough to kill the cover crop of oats planted on our spring beds, so while the weather is a challenge now, we shouldn't have to contend with unwanted oats sprouting and weeding up our spring beds!
With love and blessings for 2014,
Julie
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