Choosing Thanks

I'm very tired this morning.

Sleep was a bit fleeting again.  It has been most of this week.

And it's been a busy week, and it's going to be busier as I hit the weekend.

It's snowing again, but I drove to work anyway.  I simply couldn't face the added coordination of myself that it would take to get myself and my roommate (with no warning) to the train.  I'm hoping it sticks to the "light snow" that's forecasted, and that trying to get home tonight isn't a disaster.  I need to get home for a while in between work and plans to spend the evening with family.  If I don't make it home, I won't have bedding tonight, and I'll be moving four tires out of my trunk in the quest to find the sleeping bag that's buried somewhere in the back.  I put all of my sheets in the washer this morning, and if I don't get home, they won't make it to the dryer.  I'd definitely prefer to not have to go through the rummaging through my trunk to find a sleeping bag scenario.

I'm choosing thankfulness this morning.

I mentioned in last night's daily 5 post that driving home from house church after a long conversation with a new friend about the challenges I've dealt with for the last two years, that I was thinking about something she'd shared a few months back.  She'd talked about the process of being refined, and it struck me deeply.  Driving home last night it hit me in a fresh way that despite some of the rather hellish relational and health struggles that I've had for the last two years, I don't think I'd trade away those things if I also lost the changes within me.  It has been a fight that at times I wasn't sure I'd survive.  But I am surviving.  And I realized in a fresh way last night that I am emerging from this into new places, and that I like the person that I've become and am becoming.  I really like her.  And for me, that's huge, and hope giving and life giving.  To really like this person God is shaping me into.

So this morning, despite really cranky people in the office, and my own exhaustion, I'm choosing to be thankful  Thankful for the friend who listened to my story.  Thankful for her words a month or so back about being refined.  Thankful for the changes I'm sensing in myself, and the hope that they're giving.  And maybe even thankful for all of the really painful things (not quite sure I'm there yet), because they have been the things that have formed and birthed these changes within me.