Meant to thrive

And a happy early summer/late spring day to you, my friends and family.  I hope you are enjoying the weather as much as we are out here in the wilderness.  Kidding, on the wilderness part, sort of.  It has been a while since I bothered you last with my reports, so I'm sure you have missed me.  We have now reached summer time even here in Vermont.  The last couple of days have been beautiful and we have had the great pleasure of swimming and biking and doing a lot of summer fun things.  More of that in a moment. 


We were able to plant our raised bed, thanks to Natasha, and we don't have to scramble down to the river every time because Tom fashioned rain barrels for our garden.  They work really well.  We have had a bunch of huge weeds to contend with and Sean was so kind to give his father a weed whacker for father's day.  The garden looks so much nicer again and we can now get to the beds.

I don't want to have Logan drive!

Logan and I finished school, and got a good report from our evaluator.  We are always happy when that happens.  Now Logan is spending time in his favorite pastime, reading.  We were able to go to some historic sites and Logan had the great pleasure of being able to take a trip with Tom to Canada, Plymouth Plantation and Six Flags this spring. 

 Natasha and Sean are busy with their jobs.  Natasha is enjoying her job a lot still and is working a good many hours.  She is usually very tired and her feet hurt when she comes home.  But she always wears a smile, whether she is having a good day or not.  That makes her so special and such a blessing to me.  Sean has recently given his notice to his boss, Roland.  It was time for him to take the next step in his life.  He had been praying about it for a while and it seemed that God moved him away, finally.  He is now only working for one other person and mostly for himself!  That is such an accomplishment and at 23 years old, I have to hand it to him.  He has the beginning of a thriving business, with over 70 horses to service.  He works hard and long hours but he does it with a great attitude and care for his clients and their animals.  Aww, that's my boy!

So now we come to me, myself and I.  We are all doing pretty good.  We are having a good time with each other (just kidding).  A couple of weeks ago I had this idea for this blog.  I have been listening to the music of Casting Crowns and one of their songs really touched me, Thrive.  And I started to think about what is the meaning of thriving.

From a worldly standpoint we are not thriving!  How could we?  Come on, we have no running water (still not), no electricity, no real bathroom, and none of the luxuries we are so used to and expect to have wherever we go.  How can we talk about thriving in a place that lacks those basic needs.  On top of everything, I ran over the chord to the charger to our phone.  The company is being difficult so we now don't even have our home phone.  How is that thriving?  And still, I know we are thriving. 

As I mentioned earlier Sean is now 23 years old and Natasha is 19.  They should be out on their own!  How ridiculous for them to be living at home still.  And yet... it is my great pleasure to have my grown 'children' (please forgive me for calling you children) staying with us.  Not because we make them stay with us, but because they are happy to do so.  There is something special about having them around, and those who have the pleasure of grown children around, can testify to that.  We are thriving.  We have been put together into this situation and we are not moping about (okay we sometimes do mope) and complain about what we don't have or how they want to move out because their parents are crazy(all right, they do mention the parents are crazy sometimes)!  I see more and more families living in the same house and I think it is pretty cool.  We are thriving not because of what we have or don't have.  We are thriving because we know where our hope is.  That hope is not dependent on our situations.  We may have bad days when nothing is working out, but we are still thriving.

Tasha and I are reading through a book called "Kisses for Katie" together.  I mentioned it before and have read it before, but it is such a great reminder of thriving where you have been placed.  There are bad days, believe me I've had a couple of bad ones recently.  But I worked through them, not alone but with someone pulling me along with Him. 

The other day I was feeling pretty low and just wondering again what the point of moving up here away from friends and family was.  To live in a house not finished, to live off the land (yup we wanted it) isn't always easy.  I had just had a couple of really great days.  After starting "Kisses for Katie" I really didn't look for opportunities to see people, it just happened.  I was able to give a smile here and a kind word there to perfect strangers.  That was pretty cool. 

And then Saturday happened!  It ended up being a good day, because I did something I would normally not ever have done.  I had gone into Claremont to do some shopping and to get a chord for my phone at Verizon.  Turns out that I was not able to get it, even after returning to the store several times.  By the time I left the store I was steaming mad!  How dare they treat me, a customer, so poorly!  I had rights (again those rights)!  And then I was driving home, steaming mad, and the thought started nagging at me.  If that had been Natasha who was serving you, would you have spoken to her like that?  We are hearing a lot of stories from her about people with not so good attitudes.  I felt the Holy Spirit nudging me, hey Christ died for that guy too.  He was just doing his job, to his best ability.  I was half way back to Springfield, when I finally couldn't stand it anymore.  "All right already, I will go back to the store and apologize for my crappy attitude."  I turned around and as I was getting closer to the store I started rationalizing that I really had rights and didn't have to go back.  The clerk had it coming to him.  I almost chickened out!  I needed courage!  So I took a deep breath and prayed quickly for intervention and walked yet again into the store.

The clerk saw me coming and gave me a half smile, probably thinking oh great, her again.  I just quickly walked up to him and apologized for my bad attitude and thanked him for helping me.  He asked if I got the phone all squared away and I told him that I hadn't.  It was just a phone!  That took him by surprise but at that time I was out of the store already.  So, what did my going back do?  I have no idea!  It's not up to me!

And that leads us back to the other day when I was down and lonely and feeling sorry for myself (I was focused on me, myself and I not on what God had for me).  The kids rode their bikes down to the river, and I was getting milk and picking them up (all downhill to the river, but up back to the house).  I sat down and it hit me.  There was nowhere in CT (no offense) I could have taken the kids to swim in a river like this.  The setting was so quiet, so beautiful.  I turned my perspective back to what God had given me, instead of moping about what I didn't have.  That is thriving!  The next moment my friend Sandy pulled into the parking spot next to us.  She had just felt led to stop and chat.  It ended up that her kids came down and they all had a great time swimming that day and the next!  Thriving!  Not because I could have come up with this great plan for my day, but because He came up with the great plan for my day!  How cool is that?  I'll take it any time over having a completed house.

I hope you thrive wherever you have been put.  Have a wonderful day, week, month, year, life!  Thrive!