just journaling...

11/28/2015
I just want to be home today.
I do. I'm a little or a lot homesick for my family today.
Why did I stay here 10 years ago when I could've packed it all up and moved back home? For my girls. I did it for my girls. I didn't want them to be fatherless. I didn't want them to grow up not knowing their daddy. So I stayed. I kept them here within 10 miles of their daddy. I realize his presence and having a relationship with him was more important than my comfort zone.
So today I'm homesick for my mama who's trimming shrubs at a lady's house back home who's husband has been diagnosed with cancer.
I wish I could see pregnant Hannah and touch her belly holding that baby inside.
I wish I could hug my brother who's probably in the back yard tinkering .
I would sit with my daddy and watch some TV. probably antique roadshow.
I'd ride down to mama D's and visit with her a while and pick up my care package.
I'd go over to my sissy's and just walk around her beautiful homeplace and probably sit on the deck over the pond and breathe deeply for a while. share a few moments with her...
I'd go see Kar-Kar!!! She's the bomb!! She's so much like Abby when she was a baby. So full of energy and totally entertaining!!! Such an awesome personality.
I'd just tell Corbin she's a beautiful mama and give Court Court a hug and tell her she's just simply beautiful too and Bug better know by now that she's to be treated like a queen and if not, then well...
I'd go to the Bowman cemetery and watch a little bumble bee spin its wings over Bigmama's grave and remind myself of what an awesome legacy I have to be thankful for. Thank God once again for the 94 years and 11months she lived here... the awesome strength and also awesome dependence on Him she always showed me. God, I just miss a lot of stuff today!
I would walk over to Popeye's and stand there looking at the gravel and remind myself what an awesome man and second dad he was to me. This Thanksgiving day he would've been 73! Man, I miss him like crazy...the talks, the advice, the simple love...I miss it all! I'd be sure the John Deer tractor was still there and if it wasn't I'd go to the Dollar General and get another one...
I'd drop by my brother Scott's and check out all his Christmas decorations I've heard he's already got out and I'm sure it looks fabulous.
And I'd just be home. Where today my heart is. I'd just enjoy being with my family and hearing their loudness and being in the midst of the crazy for a while.
Hug my family for me today God, I'm a little homesick...

A Day of thanks...

Today we Americans celebrate Thanksgiving...the coming together of pilgrims looking for religious freedom and native americans already living in the land of the free...

I am thankful... I am thankful for the things we so often never as Americans give a second thought to. I haven't always been thankful for these things I'm about to mention, but if life has taught me anything it has taught me above all else, be thankful...

I had nothing to do with the fact that I was born here with the many blessings I sit here enjoying today. It's called grace=unmerited favor.

I saw a picture this morning that reminded me of love that gives sacrificially...I can hear the one boy saying to the other even now, "I'll wear the left one, you wear the right one, that way we each have at least one and together we will always make a pair."

My goodness, if that isn't love! When I say those words, "if that isn't love", I'm reminded of my favorite hymn we sang as a choir in that baptist church growing up by that title. It talks about how Jesus left the splendor of heaven knowing his destiny was the lonely hill of Golgotha, there to lay down his life for me...If that isn't love, the ocean is dry, if that isn't love, there's no stars in the sky... I still love that song! If you know it, you'll now be humming it all day thanks to me ;-)... if you don't google it!

You and I may have never had to share a pair of shoes and probably never will, but we can be thankful, so thankful for love like that and first and foremost for a savior who really did leave an amazing place called heaven where I believe the streets really are paved with gold, or something even better we've never seen, and he really did lay his life down for me and you to live a beautiful life of purpose. I believe he really did get up out of that grave on the third day so that me and you could get up out of any death causing thing of this life.

So today, I'm most thankful for Jesus my Redeemer, the one who gave me a second chance and third chance and... you get the point, but he gave me the opportunity to live again. He's so good!

I'm thankful for two amazing, beautiful-inside and outside- daughters...
I'm thankful for a family who loves and supports me and each other. We're tight and that's the way I like it...
I'm thankful for the sun that shines down on my deck today...it's almost 60 already!!
I'm thankful for Wal-mart who has employed me for 18 years on Dec 1! and so thankful for a very understanding manager when it comes to this single mom shared custody scheduling stuff!!!
I'm thankful for a toilet...that flushes, that gets dirty and gets clogged, but most of the time it flushes...so thankful!
I'm thankful for a bed, a warm cozy bed and Elizabeth's stuffed animal bear that she left behind for me to snuggle with over the next few days.
I'm thankful for a home, a washer and dryer, a dishwasher even, running water-good drinkable running water...
Food, Stop Hunger Now who gives food to those without, greenhouses behind the school in the Segera that provide food and funding for the teachers there. Electricity, lights I can cut on and cut off...heat when it's cold and ac when it's hot...
Coffee...Coffee...Coffee!!!! God bless the coffee farmers all over the world! I love the fruit of you labor!
Firepits, fireplaces, bondfires, campfires...I love the look, smell and sound of a good fire.
A car...
My healing...my healing that has taken place and is taking place...
Shoes on my feet, both my feet...
I really could sit here all day. I'm sure you could too. We are blessed. We are both so very blessed not just for the material things we have been given, but also for the eternal things. The things we can't see here on earth...
I'm reminded that today I enjoy my blessings because of a God who says, "My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts" so there's possibly a reason, I may not always think of, as to why I have been so blessed. Why you have been so blessed...Could it possibly be that today, this Thanksgiving Day 2015 you and I begin to think deeply, think a little higher, ponder for a moment as we give thanks that we, maybe we have been blessed to be a blessing to someone else...What would our good God have us to pass on...Peace, love, kindness, a pair of shoes, a coat, a turkey...whatever it is pass it on...be a blessing. It's not about me being blessed. It's not about you being blessed. It's about using what we have to be a blessing...

Happy Thanksgiving as we find ways to pass it on!
Lenee

Hello, my name is Lenee, I am a self-sufficient, bull-headed, stubborn, strongwilled, independent woman...

"Hello, Lenee," You respond....

And so we begin this support group...

I just have to say, I don't know what God is up to in this heart, head and life of mine. He is good though, I  do know that. He's been showing me so much over the past few weeks.

Just the other day, I felt him ask me why I won't just let him take care of me. Isn't that what every wife wants? Just to be taken care of by her husband? And if he's my husband like I say he is then  why can't I just let go and let him take care of me....My response was, hmmm that's such an awesome question God...why we gotta have this conversation today? The prodding continued and the question continued to linger in my head until I was able to say, ok why don't I just let you take care of me? What is it that hinders me from letting go and letting you take it?... I finally came up with a few things...

Over the past ten years of my single mom life I have become a self-sufficient, bull-headed, stubborn, strongwilled, independent woman!! I lack the ability to trust and I choose to do it myself with the fear of somebody else (even God) doing it for me and not getting it right... Yes, I said it. I am a control freak in many ways and a protector and shielder of my girls above many things. I hear the first step to recovery is recognition and admission...so, I begin here with you hearing my confession and waiting on God to show me steps two through twelve.

I don't want to be this same person a year from now or even a day from now...

When we would do spring cleaning growing up (which I hated mind you) we would have the house so messed up and I would be like, "mama, it looks so much worse now!" She would say, "sometimes you gotta mess it all up to clean up." Well, the only way I think I can put into words what I'm feeling right now is that I'm messed up (in a good way-I think) and I'm gonna choose to trust my good God to clean this mess up...oh and can I say I still hate spring cleaning!!!!

So, I just invite you this morning to ride this thing out with me. It's time for me to get raw, real and vulnerable under theses palm trees and allow my God to do what he is so good at doing... reworking and making me what I ought to be.... and just maybe some of the things he does in me will be some of the things he wants to do in you. There's a song we used to sing growing up in my little Baptist church in Ga and it's called "He's still working on me". I've been singing and humming it ever since a muddy, really muddy, day in Kenya a couple of Mondays ago... I'll be sharing about that day soon, but for now let's just sing, "it took him just a week to make the moon and the stars, the sun and the earth and Jupiter and Mars, how loving and patient he must be....

he's still working on me",
Lenee