Sunshine Mountain

I wish for the days when I was strong, when God's close friendship blessed my house. The Almighty was still with me, and my children were all around me. It was as if my path were covered with cream and the rocks poured out oil for me. Job 29:4-6

Hind sight is 20/20. Ever had to find yourself walking through a valley of darkness before you realize that the hill you were previously climbing was actually a wonderful place to be? Life is an uphill battle, there's no doubt about it, if we are to come any nearer to Him, we will have to keep climbing. Sometimes the climbing wears on you, wearies you, sometimes you have the wind at your back and the sun is not scorching, and you keep climbing, and even manage to enjoy the view along the way, other times the wind pushes against you each step of the way and the sun beats down on you draining every ounce of inner energy and the going is tough. What we don't realize in moments like these how relative things are. Until we find ourself in a dark valley, with storm clouds suffocating us and miry clay sucking our feet in at each step and making progress excruciatingly frustrating... then we realize that the breeze and the blue sky on that mountain climb of ordinary life were actually things to be delighted in compared to this hole, this well of despair, this place of darkness.

If you have never suffered from depression you might think I am using hyperbole and exaggerating, but surely each of us has been in that "dark" place at some point and you sense what I am driving at. I say all this to lead up to a little glimpse into Who I Am and Why I'm That Way.... I've been pondering my blog, and comments that have been made to me here and by private email. When I hear things like "your life looks so romantic, like a dream that so many people would love to live, you must be a wonderful mom, your kids must adore you, etc. I have to stop in my tracks and ask myself why people think that, when I am just an ordinary Prairie Chick, married to a (wonderfully) ordinary Prairie Guy, with 5 (marvelously) ordinary Prairie Chicklets living on a (spectacularily)ordinary, run of the mill Prairie Farm. Then I *got* it.

So I suppose I am a romantic of sorts, it's not that I don't *see* the ugly (my grumpy-at-times Prairie Guy, my whiny-at-times Prairie Chicklets, my old in-need-of-much-repair prairie farm house and my run-of-the-mill in need of much clean up and landscaping prairie farm yard).... it's just that I choose to look past it. Choose to find the beautiful in the every day, choose to focus on the positive. I spent too many years of my life being the type to be fixated and irked by the heap of scrap metal out in the yard, or the wood siding on the south side of our house that has been sitting half scraped and half unscraped since we bought the place, waiting for new siding which is waiting for new windows, which is waiting for the new porch which is waiting for pilings which are being drilled in the next few weeks.... or the unfinished, uncovered hardwoods in half of the house, or, or, or.

Life is too short. I choose to zoom in on the beautiful things and past the ugly. I'm not naive, my life is not a fairy tale, I know the Emerald City is not made of emeralds, but I know that God delights in a cheerful heart, so I choose to rejoice.