Well, here we are again, on my birthday. I don’t have many deep thoughts or profound truth to share today, even though, at 43, I believe you’re supposed to enter into “sage” status and impart wisdom on a regular basis.

What I would like to express, though, is heartfelt thanks to God for an amazing life. He has rescued me from fear and death, and given me a future and a hope. And an amazing man to spend my life with who I met when I was only 17, and three wild and crazy boys that keep me on my toes and laughing (and sometimes screaming). We have a roof over our heads that in a mere 17 years will be ours (once we’re done paying the bank), we have food in our pantry almost always and when we don’t it’s because Scott hasn’t had time to go to the grocery store, not because we don’t have the money to buy more.

We are in a wonderful church with people we love and who love us, three of the five of us are gainfully employed and the other two can’t legally work so we’ll let them off the hook. I love my work and know it’s what God designed me to do, and as I type this I’m looking at a butterfly who I know is laying eggs on our passion vine (which will mean soon we will have caterpillars and chrysalis again as every year – did you know butterflies go back to the place where they were born generation after generation? How do they know? Weird.)

So yes, I am tremendously blessed. I have not, however, been without heartache in my life, without loss, without depression and death and family members steeped in addiction and physical and emotional pain. I have walked with dear friends who lost a child too soon, a wonderful woman who is like family to me who’s husband died way too young, listened to my best friend ask God why and cry out when her daughter was diagnosed with diabetes. We have walked through poverty ourselves when Scott was unemployed for two years and I was a stay at home mom with three pre-schoolers wondering how we were going to pay the mortgage and the taxes and the grocery bill and being mad at God for abandoning us. I held my dad’s hand as he left this world and still cry on a regular basis because I miss him so much it can still be physically painful even though this August he will have been gone four years.

I’ve been blessed to deliver groceries to families and pray with them as our church gave them financial help. Families with no roof over their heads. No job. No body to help them or love them. And that’s a blessing, too. I’ve prayed with women who were being sexually abused and listened as a girl who was kidnapped and raped by sex traffickers shared her story. And I thought I would die inside from watching her cry and wondering how a God who loved her could allow that to happen.

All that to say, it’s not been easy up until now. And I don’t expect it to get any easier. In fact, it may get harder. But God is still God. And he loves me as his precious daughter. And he is good. This much I know to be true.

So I’ll keep praying and loving and running and traveling and saying yes to whatever God sends my way because even with all the ups and downs and pain and struggle, it’s a life worth living and I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.

Happy running!! And thanks for reading.

Jen