End of the Old and Beginning of the New

Grateful I am that this year is done, over, finished.

Not that it was a bad year. It really wasn't. It was one with many good moments and memories, funny things that happened, milestone birthdays & anniversaries and just bonding times that have drawn my family closer together.

But it was also a year of pain, sadness, sickness & death. It was a year of disappointments, incredible frustrations (mostly centred around our van), growing pains and tears.

What I have discovered anew is that yes, the good moments are fondly remembered and talked about but they are made better by the fact that they have often come from the "bad" and painful moments of the year. Sometimes set in sharp relief, the happier times were happy because we had to endure the sad stuff. For example, when our van broke down days before we were to head our for a family camping trip, it was very difficult to get past the frustration and almost anger we felt. We don't have any extra money set aside to help us through vehicle repairs and this van tends to rack up expensive repairs and so we end up relying on family and husband's work to get us through. We don't expect them to help but God's provision seems to have included them for which we are very grateful. So there were days when we were sure that we wouldn't get a vacation nor would we even be able to get our van repaired.

And here is where God created joy out of sorrow, peace in the midst of our small storm. My in-laws offered us their vehicle to transport kids and camping gear to where we were intending to spend our holiday. Husband's work offered to get our van to the repair facility and would discuss the bill with us after we got home. So, did we have a good time camping? Absolutely. Did we recognize God's provision and blessing? Absolutely. More examples of God taking care of us after we got home and I am still amazed at God's love and care for us even when it feels and appears like we have nothing to offer.

God is good. He is loving and He is grace incarnate. We are taken through rough and difficult times. None of what God is means that we are immune to struggle and pain and sadness. The truth is that without these things, we don't grow and we don't understand the depths of joy and peace and calm.

So yes, I am glad this year is over. That doesn't mean I will shove my memories and accumulated feelings about the year in a drawer and wish it never happened. Rather the opposite...I can enter the new year understanding how God has changed me and built me up. I can move forward believing that God will continue to create in me a heart of wisdom and strength. I don't know what will happen this new year. I don't know if it will be filled with good or troublesome things. I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God will walk beside me and mine, holding us and caring for us as we abide and live in obedience to Him.

Thank you God for this year...for the good, the bad and the truly ugly parts of it. Thank you for the new year to come...may you use us to bless others as You have blessed us.

New Discoveries

New discoveries...this I am grateful for today.

The particular new discovery I am referring to is one I found while reading through some threads on Crosswalk a couple days ago. It is Apple Cider Vinegar, in particular, unpasteurized and with the "mother" inside. I know, sounds odd and weird and all kinds of other adjectives and normally, I am not one to jump on the health-food bandwagon. However....

One of my fears is having scopes and tests and invasive procedures and horrible diagnoses regarding my body and health. My mom and my sisters and my brother have all endured these things and it scares me, quite frankly. And since I have inherited much of their phisology and health tendencies, I am fairly certain these things will be in my future. Unless I do something about it, at least, do what I can to stem all that off.

Hence my excitement, albeit hesitant and skeptical, about the wonders of APV in its raw form. So today I bought some (along with locally-grown honey) and after supper I took my first "dose". One tbsp mixed in half a bottle of water was sort of hard to swallow, had a tangy, sharp taste but after dipping my finger in the honey, the taste very quickly disappeared.

So what are the results so far? Well, my stomach feels abit pangy...not achy, not acidy but I feel a few pangs or pings. I am not hungry or craving anything which I generally feel at this point in the evening. I am still headachy but that's most likely from the coughing I've been doing all day.

There you go. Darryl has told me to do this for a month and then see how I feel at the end. That's what I will do.

So thank you to those on Crosswalk who have touted all the benefits of APV and who have unbeknownst to them convinced me to try this.

Gratitude

Gratitude is not easy for me sometimes. I get caught in some of the grouchy, irritated and just plain bad feelings I have and that's where I stay. Take today for example. It should have been a good day. We were all home, relaxing and enjoying some of the gifts we had received...well, that the kids received. They were up early, whipped through their "must-do" tasks and then jumped full-throttle into the Nintendo Wii game they were playing. This, for them, is a lot of fun.

As for me, I slept in late, having slept not so well last night. This cough of mine hasn't let up and I cough so much that it gives me a headache. So as much as I relished the idea of sleeping in it really wasn't the best since I woke up with an even worse headache.

I came downstairs and the kids were having a great time. Yet all I saw was the mess in the living room and kitchen from Christmas eve and from dumping all our stuff after our day out yesterday. The dishes were piled on the counter still and there were things everywhere I looked. I seriously wondered why I got up this morning.

This afternoon didn't improve my outlook much. Wandering ar0und in Blogger World, I began to envy much of what others have written in their blogs. The blogs I read were so inspirational, funny, heart-warming or hard-hitting pull-no-punches sorts of stuff that as much as I loved reading them, I felt discouraged because my pitiful little blog is nothing of any of that sort. It's just a blog...boring, unread and uncommented on by anyone. I kept thinking I should make an effort for 2008 to blog consistently but then I just got overwhelmed thinking about it.

But then...as I was making Peppermint Balls, and dwelling on the whole blog dilemma, I thought that maybe I should just be grateful. Oprah always talks about a gratitude journal. My blog could be that...a gratitude blog. It could be a good way to end the day by focusing on something other than the bad stuff or negative feelings or the blahs of the day. Beginning the day with prayer and reading God's word and ending it with praise and thankfulness for something that God has blessed me with truly appeals to me.

So now, today, I am grateful for this blog and the blogs I read earlier that inspired and pushed me to think outside my critical self. I am thankful for God's boundless patience with me when I give in to my feelings and forget that there is so much to be thankful for.

A Passion a Day

Talked with one of my sisters this morning and she and I ended up discussing the whole concept of passion in our lives. As usual she could relate to everything I was telling her, and while on one level it cheers me to know she understands me so well, on another level, it irritates me a bit because almost everything I reveal about myself, she says she is exactly the same way. I want to be unique and yet I seem to have a twin personality living several hundred miles away. Once again there is this dichotomy in my life where I am glad to have someone who really knows me and I am frustrated that she does. Ugh. At any rate, the passion discussion was still good for me because it helped solidify some of the things I have been thinking of late. She was excited for me, is excited for me - to live day to day, asking God only to be passionate about something for that day, something that He wants me to be passionate about in order to accomplish a task or service for Him is a unique way to live. She suggested that I record each day's passion. I told her about this blog and maybe this is why I started it. A journey with God learning each day to live His passion and accomplish His purposes on earth.

Creating

Today I was purposefully going to sit and write a post. So here I sit. And my mind is scrambling for something meaningful and profound to say. I have read some journals and feel quite inadequate with my own words as they appear here. I have learned over the years not to compare myself to others but it gets hard not to sometimes. Words have always been my thing, the thing I did quite well at in school and in private. Yet they need passion behind them, a driving force for them to be powerful, meaningful and memorable. At least I think that's what's happening. The same with music. I used to play the piano. When I was the most emotional, the most conflicted, at that moment my music made sense and I played the best. I even composed a few pieces - looking back, it had been a very emotional year for me but I was able to convert all those feelings with the passion accumulated into music and poetry. Does that mean I am passionless now? It feels that way to me. Not that I want or even liked living in a roller-coaster world of emotions that I lived way back then but I wonder if I really feel anything anymore. Except anger and frustration. Those emotions I feel more often than ever. Maybe being more even-keeled, more grounded and dare I say, calm, is what happens in one's middle years. I don't know since I'm just now approaching them. It seems to me, however, that I was created with this element of me that requires deeper feelings, passion, to drive me to create. For without creating something ( I am finally past the need to create babies, thankfully) my days drift into others,

Plans

This is actually my second post today but hopefully the first one to get posted. I lost the first one; I still don't know how but I clicked something and poof! the entire post just disappeared. Funny how the title of the lost post was named "Thwarted". Anyway, I no longer feel the pressing need to repeat my ventings of earlier so I will write about something else.

Today I spoke to a friend of mine on the phone. She just recently had a birthday and I hadn't spoken to her since she & her family had returned from their vacation to Disney World. It was good to catch up with her after not talking for a few weeks. That is the surprisingly cool thing about our friendship - we just pick up where we left off and there is genuiness and encouragement in our interactions that I don't always get with others. She had a really good time in Florida and all the concerns she had about transporting her brood of boys in a small vehicle turned out to be non-issues after all. She has such a way of describing the funny and not-so-funny things in her life that it makes me feel like I'm there with her as it happens. She is a great storyteller. Sometimes I wish I could compile all her stories into a book but my remembering is never as good as the original telling.

This weekend would have been a great opportunity to visit her since my boys are going on a father-son trip up north and it will be just my daughter and I at home. The problem is that we only have one vehicle and that vehicle will gone. So I will be here for two days, when most of me really wants to be somewhere else. Those feelings of frustration were the topic of my lost post and I'm trying to be gracious about this sense of abandonment and thwarted plans. Its not easy, though. I do know that if God truly wanted me to go on a road trip to visit my friend and my sister He could easily plop a vehicle in my driveway. The likelihood is that I will remain here and I choose to believe that if that is the case, then there is a very good reason for this. He wants me to be where I can be of the most service and maybe that is right here at home. Time will tell.

A New Beginning

This is the beginning of my blogging experience. I am new at this, I admit, and my posts will probably bore the pants off of most readers but I'm hoping that it will be good for me. So here goes...the beginning of my adventures online.

Its been a satisfying day. A day filled with energy, accomplishments and most of all, passion. I've been praying for passion in my life and well, God delivered today. I didn't expect to get passionate about cleaning and decluttering but I was. The chaos that was our basement is slowly getting under control and my internal chaos is likewise becoming subdued. I wish I wasn't this way sometimes - emotionally subject to the state of my environment - but I am learning to accept this in myself. With acceptance comes growth and change and with change comes the freedom to be the person I was created to be.

There we are...my first post. This could be the start of a new passion!