Thanksfulness – Thankful Runner Girl

I live in a valley. The most beautiful valley in the state, if you ask me. Unfortunately, you can’t always tell that I live in a valley. My valley is about an hour away from the front gate of Yosemite National Park as well as an hour away from the front gate of Sequoia National Park, well, maybe I should say my town not my valley. In any event, the mountains are flush with snow right now and the air is clean and so the views when I drive over to my school are breathtakingly beautiful! I mean I could stare at the wonder of the mountains and the snow for hours. The foothills are green and the mountains are snow capped, its the valley of my youth. I was so very thankful to God today for my views, almost 360, amazing!

My valley feeds the world. It is a beautiful place to live, even in the summer when it’s hot. I love it in every season but my favorite is probably right now just before spring and fall, whenever that happens because sometimes it doesn’t happen until December. We live hours away from a spectacular coast line and like I wrote an hour away from beautiful foothills, lakes and world class National Parks.

I love running here. It’s spectacularly beautiful most days. I love my drives to work. I love driving past the open green fields and the orchards. Much of the land has been owned by family farmers, sometimes for generations. It’s getting harder for them though, which concerns me. My town is a relatively conservative leaning town in a crazy liberal state. I enjoy my town. I know people at my church and in my community. I feel like I belong. I care about the people here, the kids here. Some days I am so happy as I drive through my valley I think my heart will burst, like today.

Today….for the spectacularly beautiful mountains that are surrounding my valley, they remind me of God’s ever lasting and ever surrounding love…I Give Thanks!

KOR

Well, I kinda cheated on this one. I let my husband go before me when we were in line for communion but because of the way we enter and leave the pews, you kind of have to let the people to the right of you in front of you. So, as we were leaving church, I made sure to let an older man out of the church door before me. I wasn’t sure I was going to have another opportunity to let anyone else in front of me in a line as I wasn’t sure we were shopping today. We did go shopping today after all but wouldn’t you know it? There was NO line!

After church on Sunday my family comes to our house for brunch. Sometimes we have breakfast stuff, sometimes lunch stuff. Today we had Chili Verde, which wasn’t actually very Verde-ish but still good, eggs, fried potatoes, oh and my mom’s homemade pinto beans, yum! Toast! There was also toast! Sometimes it’s just my parents and my brother or sister but today everyone was here. I really enjoy seeing my family. All of their children are our God-Children, we are lucky that way:-)

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The homily at church was about being watchful. The homily on-line, that I like to listen to was about asking the question, How do we want to be remembered? The gist of the idea being if you know where you want to end up you can develop a plan to get there.

We will light our Advent candle in just a bit and we got our Christmas tree today. I also enjoy both of those traditions this time of year. We bless our wreath with the following prayer and every night we light the candle for that week.

The usual song is O Come Emmanuel…we are waiting. Strangely, we are waiting for both the end and the beginning. Kinda weird I guess.

Lord our God,
we praise you for your Son, Jesus Christ:
he is Emmanuel, the hope of the peoples,
he is the wisdom that teaches and guides us,
he is the Savior of every nation.
Lord God,
let your blessing come upon us
as we light the candles of this wreath.
May the wreath and its light
be a sign of Christ’s promise to bring us salvation.
May he come quickly and not delay.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.
R/. Amen.

I liked the verse from O Come Emmanuel we sang tonight. It would definitely be good if division could cease.

Come, O Come, Emmanuel”:

O come, desire of nations, bind
in one the hearts of humankind;
bid ev’ry sad division cease
and be thyself our Prince of peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.

Looking forward to decorating our tree and trying to enjoy the moments I find myself in, though truth be told I’ve been on the Grinchie side the last few hours. It always seems Sunday nights find me with more to do than I would actually care to do, add holiday stuff on top of that and, well…deep breath and try to come back to the moment instead of worrying about tomorrow. It will get here soon enough, with God’s blessing.

So today, for the First Sunday of Advent, Family breakfast, Christmas trees, light and waiting…I Give Thanks!

KOR

Here’s a before shot of our Christmas Tree and our Advent Wreath…