home-from-vacation gratitude.

For dropping the suitcases and bags of sandy swimsuits at the door, and choosing to waste time roaming in the backyard first.

 

For the sunflowers our next-door neighbor gave us.

 

For the teeming garden and salads with lettuce, kale, carrots, cucumbers and radishes, all grown by my husband, who works outside every day in order to create something useful and lovely. For learning to use a sprinkler to keep everything watered.

 

For butterfly bushes, which I pruned down to two-feet in February, now nearly as tall as I am. For butterflies in our backyard.

 

For slugs and cockroaches and mosquitoes. For a living yard, even with its pests. For honeybees! For lettuce that bolted in the sun and caterpillar-gnawed kale leaves and brussels sprouts that died in the heat. For the realities of organic gardening. For weeds. For a backyard that doesn’t always feel like a blog post.

 

For the new fence-long chicken run David and Amie built, so that our girls can scratch in the dirt happily all day without consuming our blueberries and digging up raised beds. For in-laws who rescued our six ladies when they decided to make themselves free-range by escaping the run during our vacation. For orange-yolked eggs.

 

For the baking June sun and the bead of sweat that trickles down my face and the ant meandering across the notebook page as I write this. For t’shirts and bare feet and enough Vitamin D.

 

For unfinished projects and healthy bodies to work and slow Saturdays. For a husband who always grabs a few kids and takes them on his Lowe’s runs.

 

For a girl who loves her chickens and takes care of them every day and says “When I grow up, I want to work on a farm.”

 

For dads and daughters who are kindred spirits in their love of the outdoors.

 

For weeks where everything goes wrong and the kids get sick and the AC breaks and I hit a parked car in the Food Lion parking lot. For stressing about doctor’s bills and trying to whittle down my grocery spending which has gotten out of hand again. For strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.

 

For tomatoes.

 

For grabbing hold of gratitude in the midst of the pressures of daily life and bored kids and oven-hot South Carolina summer days. For rejoicing because you know what all of this means? We are alive. We get the joys and the sorrows and immense privilege of living another day.

For eyes to see the world in all its aching loveliness. It’s not as spotless as Pinterest or Instagram. It is better. It’s real.

For a Creator God that thought up yellow sunflowers the size of my hand-span and sand crabs with eyes sprouting from their heads and orb-weaver spiders.

For learning with Rich Mullins this summer: There’s so much beauty around us/But just two eyes to see/Everywhere I go, I’m looking.

For giving thanks in all things.

This world is beautiful but badly broken. St. Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning. I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and comedies of history. I love it with all its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers. I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children catching their first butterfly.

I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story. And like every good story, there will be an ending. I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be.

I love it because it spins and tilts, because it’s dizzying, because of the night sky and the swirling lights.

– N.D. Wilson, Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl