Sentence or Servanthood?

We are DONE!!!

My dad is the man!

I want to give you a bit of perspective- because if you are not a farmer's wife (or homeschooling mom) you won't have any idea what the past few months have been like. I am not complaining, just painting a picture.

During pre-seeding and seeding my husband usually wakes up and is out of the house BEFORE six in the morning, and doesn't come home AT ALL, until sometime between 10pm and 2 am. He doesn't eat any meals with us at the table. He packs a lunch and we take him supper or have one of our 'men' take it to him. My kids get NO time with daddy, except for those times in the tractor, where we have to 'sit still,' 'don't touch,' 'be quiet,'... This year we did not have one rain day so this 'routine' extended from mid- April until now. My kids don't go to school (well my middle goes to a 1.5 hr pre-school once a week) and I foolishly did not have us registered in any programs.

Some of you might be thinking- big deal, my husband works in the oilfield and is gone for weeks (months?) on end. I do not know how you ladies do it. What I think makes this time hard is that we are not used to NOT having daddy around. The boys and I rely on him for lots of things around the house on a regular basis and all winter long he spends lots of time in his office in the house. By the end of seeding we usually have gotten used to his absence, but it takes us some time to adjust to not having someone you normally heavily depend on.

It's funny how even a little bit of breathing room brings renewed perspective. I can see so much more clearly the mistakes I made through these past few months. Things kicked into high gear litearally hours after we returned from Hawaii- and I never got a chance to catch my breath or even truly prepare myself for what was ahead.

But this morning, I had a chance to look through my journal and read some of the entry's and gain perspective on some of the things I have learned, and some of the things that God wanted me to learn but I may have missed.

These are some of the things I have recorded in my journal over the past months- perhaps others need to hear these messages too?

" We can choose thanksgiving in the midst of difficulty. Doing so completely changes a person. It not only transforms his faith, it transforms his face. A thankful heart understands who God is and recognizes His provision for our lives. A thankful heart attracts others to Christ through its contentment in joy, it's ability to rejoice in the Lord in every circumstance. May our faces reflect thankful hearts, and may our thankfulness reflect an understanding of God's presence and His countless blessings in our lives."
from 10 Minute Time Outs for Mom's - Grace Fox

"His purpose for our trials is often to bring us humbly before Him to experience a breaking in our inner, independant, self-sufficient selves and grow us up into compassionate, patient, spiritually strong, God glorifying people. He uses these situations to teach us how to trust that He loves and cares enough for to get us through the tough times. "
from The Power of a Praying Wife- Stormie Omartian

" Rarely does God do something exactly as we think He will. Much of our frustration as Christians has nothing to do with what God does or doesn't do. It has everything to do, rather, with the false assumptions we make about how we think God will and should act. " unfortunatly I don't have it written in my journal where this came from

" It's no accident that we have the children we have; God made them and placed them in out care. When he did so, He knew our limitations, but He still entrusted us with these children... we can deduce that if God in his divine wisdom chose to give sinful children to sinful parents, then our children are not so weak that they are unable to endure our sinful behaviour... Our children are not that fragile. If they were, God would have waited until we were further along in the maturing process before He gave them to us. But he didn't..... We come into the family as imperfect people, and we sin against each other every day; yet through rubbing shoulders and learning to ask for, and offer, forgiveness, we all come out the richer for taking part in this sometimes painful process." from Sacred Parenting by Gary Thomas

In the midst of it all, it looks like God had some big lessons for me to learn. Perhaps now that the intensity of this crazy season is over, I will have some more time and perspective to digest these things more.

And for today, we are packing up and heading to the mountains!