love your life

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Love your life.

This post has been swimming around in my head for a few weeks now. I read that phrase, "love your life" one day in passing, when I skimmed the cover of a magazine. They purposefully had the word "your" in bold print. Obviously wanting that piece to stand out - and make a point. Since then, I've thought about those 3 words over and over. And I got to a point shortly after, in which I felt comfortable stating that I do love my life. I wasn't too interested in trading my life with someone else's and I felt pretty good about the direction things seemed to be going for us. It was around that time, that posting about "love your life" here started making sense to me. Like I had some handle on things that I might ought to share with someone else. Well, suffice it to say, the Lord felt it necessary to test my resolve. In essence, He was asking me the question, "Kasey, do you love your life? Really?" And as if it were a live conversation my thoughts said, "of course... things are looking pretty good... why not love my life".

Then a set of events took place in our personal lives that forced me to look deeper into the meaning (and importance) of loving your life.

Let me back up a minute and say that nothing earth-shattering happened in our lives during the past few weeks (I'm secretly hoping we've reached our limit of earth-shattering events for a while), but it was a series of disappointments that though individually were relatively small, seemed to pile up into an overwhelming sense of despair. We'd get our hopes up about something and then have to accept that it wouldn't come to fruition. And then Ethan's horrible rash on his face & diaper area factored into the mix (side note: praise report, his face is sooooo much better!) and many other factors that just squelched my spirit. I felt a sort of envy start to rise up in me that made me feel like giving up on having any enthusiasm for... well, anything. And I started the downhill spiral of comparing our situation with someone else's, or being irritated that we weren't able to move forward towards a desire that we had, and completely moving away from gratitude over the things we did have in our lives. After about 2 weeks of battling with these various disappointments, God brought back to my mind the phrase "love your life". And I (shamefully) remembered how it wasn't but a month ago that I felt "qualified" to write about such a phrase and felt confident that I did love my life (and was thankful for it).

Then it all clicked.

A test.

"Kasey, do you love your life? Even if it's not picture perfect? Even if you have to wait a little longer for the desires of your heart? Even if you don't always get the desires of your heart... can you still love your life? Can you still be thankful for what you do have?"

A ton of bricks... let me tell you.... it hit me like a ton of bricks!

Of course! All of these situations were to force me to take a deeper look inside myself. The Lord couldn't let me blindly assume an area of my life was fully in check, if it really wasn't. It's like thinking you're sincere, only to find out that when pressed a little harder, you realize that maybe really aren't. So when I told myself "life is good!" I honestly wasn't believing that current situations were good, I was telling myself that once "xyz" happens... then life will be good! In a sense, living for the expectation of something happening - and basing my "contentment" on the fulfillment of that expectation - instead of truly being content within the current situation, as is. So when the expectation isn't met, disappointment and resentment show their true color, and you realize (as I did) that your "contentment" wasn't real. See, God knew that about my heart... but I didn't. And in His own way, He allowed me to figure that out. To take an inventory of the goodness in my life and truly be thankful for it. All of it. Even if nothing changed from what it is today - not just with Ethan, but in every detail of our lives - that life would still be good.

My life.

It's very good.

And I'm very thankful to be living it.

Whether it's the roof over our head, the toys for our little tyke, or a husband that knows to keep the refrigerator full of diet dr. pepper and the freezer full of whole wheat blue berry waffles. It's all good. And, I can honestly say - without any thought for tomorrow or what may or may not be in store for us - I love my life.