With a grateful heart.

I love Thanksgiving. It's the perfect time to be with family and reflect on the many many blessings we've been given before the rush of Christmas activities bombard us and take over the month of December.

I've been thinking a lot lately what I'm most thankful for. Besides the obvious things - my Jesus, my husband, our boys, the ability to provide for our family, etc.

This year, and more specifically the past few months, I am realizing that I'm most thankful for the idea that this place is not our home.

We can do our best to make a house a home, to make a community feel like home, and make our surroundings home. But this earth... this place... is not our home. It's not our forever.

These trials, the frustrations of life, the struggles of being a parent, the friends who have cancer and ones who have lost a child, in job loss and financial difficulties, through the mundane and loss of direction in our lives...

This place is not our home.

I feel like I've spent the last year of our lives waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a new job for Tyler so we can move. Waiting for the perfect house to come on the market and our financing to line up so we can buy. Waiting for something exciting to happen, waiting to feel like we're "at home" in Kansas City... and yet, have completely missed the point.

Maybe the reason I don't feel at "home" is because this isn't our home. Once I'm able to give up this idea of finding home on earth, I'm able to see things differently. Trusting that THIS is where we're serving Him, because He's called us to THIS place for THIS time... it changes everything!

Thank you Jesus, that this is not our end game! You're still writing our story, and using us in so many ways, even when we don't see it or feel it.

We have so many reasons to be thankful.

Hope in our forever home - Heaven - is high on my list.

So are these two boys.

What about you - what are you grateful for this year?

Happy Thanksgiving, friends!