The gifts that don't come with bows...

I am a crazily upbeat, happy, person 99% of the time. My best friend has gone so far as to tell me on one occasion when we were trapped in the Miami airport with an impending hurricane upon us, to "Take your Pollyanna Happy Perky Attitude and Eat It". Probably the best single piece of advice I've ever gotten from her. However, there are those times when even I can't see the forest for the trees. Life is like that a lot sometimes, as in "Here's your dirt sandwich...would you like a mud milkshake to wash that down"? It's been like that a bunch lately. Through all the multiple goings-on with just keeping our heads above water in this deployment (or so it seems...we're really floating on the surface), it's been easy for me to lose sight of what's truly important. The best gifts in my life have been ones that were confusing, muddling, back-breaking, heart-breaking, and mind-blowing, and they've all been given to me by my most gracious God. There's a lot going on right now in our family, none of which I'm going to go into here, but it's caused me to take my focus off the vital: that through it all, God deserves all, ALL the glory. That has been my prayer through this deployment since it started...that Mike and I and the Kiddles would bring God glory, but I lost sight of that.

Then, today, after going through another one of "those" days and hearing that my sweet husband had gone through one of "those" days, I saw this, and everything changed. It's eight minutes, but it blew me away. Again, one of those gifts that I didn't expect but that got me back to the heart of it all:

Sometimes the things we want most in this world, and the things that maybe more importantly we DON'T, while those those are experiences we don't understand and don't accept, are the VERY things that will bring GOD the GLORY he so deserves.

This little, simple 8 minute video brought it home, loud and clear...