I didn’t date before I met my husband. To be more clear, I did some “I kissed dating goodbye” style dating which I can’t recommend. Statuses are unclear and confusion abounds, but whatever. That’s neither here nor there. I didn’t date, but knew I wanted to be married. I prayed for my (then unknown) future husband, occasionally talked about him with my girlfriends and even wrote to him periodically in a journal.
Fast forward a decade or so and here I am, married with one daughter and a yet to be determined number of children twinkling in my eye. I have so much, yet life doesn’t always measure up to my dreams. There are bills to pay, chores to do, relationships to manage and maintain. It’s easy to let the passage of time become a never ending game of tag where you’re always “it.”
Some of the difficulties are trivial. Arguments over who gets to make their lunch in our small kitchen first and we’re not patient enough today to work around each other. Frustration because our daughter’s shoes won’t fit onto her scrunched up feet and we’re running late. Irritation when the car battery dies, there’s no time to fix it, and we were counting on two cars for the morning events. (All those petty disappointments from last week smack of #firstworldproblems.) But then there are serious challenges. Family members unexpectedly dying. The only household earner being laid off. ER visits. These things have all happened in the last year and some days I ache for my missing sister, long for the flexibility of a stable budget and anxiously pray for the health and safety of my family.
Hard times are guaranteed to come. Whether the challenges are superficial or soul crushing, I find I’m happiest when I pause and take stock of what I have and how far I’ve come. As a college student, in high school, in middle school and even as a little girl, I daydreamed about being married. I thought about the kids we would have and the way we would end the day and go on vacations. Life isn’t easy and there are curve balls to be sure, BUT. I’m living my dreams, big and small.
It’s important to pause. There is beauty and power when we remember our dreams and notice the ways they came true. Gratitude is the key to slowing time down and it is the path to genuine celebration. In taking notice we find that we have life to the fullest. Even in moments of grief, exhaustion and hardship, we have been given so much.
What gift in your life do you forget you have?
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