As we approach Thanksgiving I am asked “What are you thankful for?”  The answer is not as easy as the question.  You see, I am not only thankful, I am blessed.  Blessed with health and home, blessed with the love of a good man, and blessed with the life of two beautiful boys.  As a young woman, daydreaming of my future I could not have envisioned a more perfect life.  We don’t have much, but the Lord has always provided what we need.

I never thought in my late twenties and single that I would be thankful for that time in my life.  I remember crying and praying for God to send me someone, anyone to love and love me.  They say looking back that you have 20/20 vision – I can clearly see now that the Lord was teaching me patience.  The lesson was a hard one, but waiting for the right man was definitely worth it.  As I was walking down the aisle at age thirty, the same girls I was so jealous of were signing their first divorce papers.  I have been married for 13 years now and love him more today than I ever thought possible.

The day before our second wedding anniversary, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.  It was a difficult delivery that ended with an emergency c-section.  Clayton developed jaundice and was very ill.  I developed kidney and cardiac problems.  We were in and out of the hospital for weeks following the birth.  I am so thankful that he is an extremely intelligent, sharp witted, and handsome pre-teen.  I am looking forward to watching him develop into a man.  I can’t wait to see what wonderful things lay in his future.

After 8 years of trying to conceive another child, my husband and I decided it just wasn’t meant to be.  Well meaning family members would ask, “When are you going to have another one?”  My standard answer became, “God only gives you what you can handle and Clayton is it!”  Little did I know what God had in store for our little family.  Colton was born April 2011, again, another rocky pregnancy and even worse delivery.  The c-section lasted 2 ½ hours and while the baby was fine, I was fading fast.  The doctor later told my husband, “That is as close as I have ever come to losing a patient.”  I had internal bleeding that they could not control from the adhesions I developed with the first c-section, and this was the reason why I had difficulty conceiving the second time.  I had a long recovery, but would not change a thing.  My 2 year old is a wild, rambunctious, curious child that exhausts me, yet makes me smile every day.

In answer to the question, “What are you thankful for?”  I am thankful for the sound of a child’s laughter, for stepping on Lego’s in the middle of the night, for fingerprints on glass, and for the sentence “What is for dinner, Honey?”  Those are the signs and sounds of a happy and healthy family, but more than anything I am thankful for a caring God that doesn’t always provide what we want, when we want it.  He has provided me with more love than I could have ever thought possible.