This writer is a homebody.

She avoids crowds, lines, and noise. Craves quiet, simplicity, and alone time.

Left alone, she’d spend days with a good book and journal. Summers would find her in the hammock with an iced tea. In the winter, she’d curl up under a blanket with a steaming mug of coffee and a warm fireplace.

Perhaps in another season of life, those days will come by more frequently. They will never be the norm, for God never intended us to stop serving others and focus only on ourselves when we turn 55.

In this season now, time is for relationships with children, modeling a godly life, teaching how the world works, exploring God’s beautiful world, gently correcting and practicing when they get it wrong.

This time is not for me.

A recent Saturday found us tromping around a local fruit farm. Police directed the anthill of cars into neat lines on recently-mown fields.

We waited long and hot for the hayride out to the pumpkin patch. Children swarmed over barrels, pumpkins, and benches, clamored to feed the llamas, and practiced waiting their turn, some better than others.

We drank in their delight at their hay-bale seats, adventures in the the fields, the search for the biggest and weirdest and most perfect. They embraced greyhounds seeking home, bounced barefoot in the primary-colored-castle, and wore a layer of farm home. As we returned with our fall harvest, we savored fresh-made donuts melting with sugar…our pay for the adventure, the sweat and dust and no naps.

That night, hair shower-damp and skin smelling like children and not like fields, we asked what they would thank God for. All three cheered “Going to the pumpkin farm” and “Donuts” and “Hayride.” And one said, “It was the best day ever.”

I am thankful for these memories, too. Most of all, I am thankful for their gratitude.

What uncomfortable thing will you be thankful for this weekend?

(Also, a gentle reminder that my kind sponsor, Miss Selby’s Soaps, is offering a 20% discount on all orders placed with the promo code joy.)

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Sponsor a child in Bolivia with World Vision

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