remembering gratitude and forgetting to be exhausted

Today as I drove to work, I was struck again by the beauty of this magical, wild land. I was driving away from my school and I had a flashback of the icy, snow-covered barren landscape only a few months ago. We drove past old cars, almost completely buried in snow every day. Now they look like normal cars, sitting casually in the heather and perfectly green grass, drinking in the sunshine as if they had never been frozen to death.

It is a blessing to live in this country of extreme weather; blizzards, tornadoes, ice storms, wind storms, hot humidity and dry cold. It is beautiful.

I love the days when you look across the horizon and can see the natural curvature of the earth.

I love the days when the rainstorms travel across the sky and you can see where it's raining and where it's not. And then you try and guess how many minutes it will be until you crash into those far off sheets of rain.

My mother and I took the librarian from my college out for supper tonight. It was 75 cent hotdog day the the Tourond gas station and the community embraced the event, full of enthusiasm. It was a wonderful evening, complete with sunshine, shorts, running into some little kids I babysat this year, hotdogs and swirled ice cream.

I am thankful and God is so good every single day.

I am writing this now because I am exhausted. By the time I get my next day off, I'll have worked 15 consecutive days. Yes, I am thankful for the amount of hours but I feel slightly overwhelmed. When I do have some time, I have a lot to get done and it's hard to remember what needs to come first.

But I remember how I greeted this day, smiling to myself as I drove those 31 kms, an inner joy so deep seeming to well up and engulf me. And I know that joy is always in me... and I know it only grows deeper as we experience surface sorrows.

As flighty, moody and unsatisfied as our human characters are, I pray that my spirit will ever overcome myself and remind me of those moments when God shows me that, "It is good."