30 days of Thankfulness

11.7.13

     There is kind of a "tradition" on Facebook of saying 30 days of things you are thankful for. I love this because it makes you look for the little joys in each day. Mine have looked like this:

 30 days of thankful day 1: I am thankful to be able to wear non-preggo jeans for the first time today!!!
Day 2: I am thankful for Jenny
Day 3: I am thankful for our church
Day 4: I'm thankful for our doggies 
Day 5: I am thankful for grace: both God's grace that He bestows on me, and the grace that He puts in me for me to give others.
Day 6: I am so grateful for the ladies in my Bible study. 

      Obviously, some days it is easier to think of things to be thankful for than others. I always try to build up and have my most important thankfuls at the end of the month, but I've seen where other people do it the opposite and have #1 be what they are the most thankful for.
       On the 7th, I was talking to my Mom and she said, "You know what today is, right?!" I paused for a minute and really thought- it wasn't anybody's birthday that I could think of. I didn't know of anyone who had anything exciting going on that day... Nope, didn't know what today was.
      "Today is that day that Alex SHOULD have come home from Afghanistan!" She said. 


       Wow. WOW. Sometimes 7 weeks can seem like an instant and sometimes it can feel like an eternity. 
        When you're deployed, they give you a time frame of "when" things should happen. This deployment, Alex was told that it was going to be for 9 months. When he left on February 7, everyone in my family marked the day on the calendar for his return. We knew we would be there with open arms waiting for him to get off that plane and greet us. We claimed the promise that God was going to bring him home safely. 
         We knew going into both the deployment and the pregnancy that there was a very real possibility that Alex wasn't going to be here for Kaitlyn's arrival. His supervisors required that I get several letters from my OB stating that yes, I really was pregnant, and yes, our due date was really September 23. As we found out that Kaitlyn was breech and got our c-section scheduled, I had to get another letter requesting that Alex be brought home early to be here for the birth. I am so incredibly thankful that my OB was okay with doing that (some doctors don't really want to write a letter to anybody in the government requesting special attention) and that she usually got it done within about a 24 hour period. Then I would scan it in and email it to Alex, always keeping the hard copy at home just in case I needed to mail it off to his home base or something.
         I love this tradition of looking for things to be thankful for. It has really helped me keep my positive attitude through all of this. Are there really hard days? Absolutely. But looking for a blessing in each day helps me refocus on the good things.