Thankful Thursday, second edition

 Happy Thursday, friends! I thought I'd share a few things I am grateful for this week.

First up is family. In six days worth of time, I have seen my in-love's, my dad and stepmom, my mom and stepdad, two of my sisters and one nephew. I will always be grateful for family and that we live so close by them. It's truly an honor to have family around, and I never want to take them for granted.

I have actually had the thought lately that I am thankful that I do NOT have a job. I've been thinking about getting a part time job lately, and while I still think I will do that over the summer or in the fall of next year when I no longer have high school students I'm homeschooling, for now I am free and able to help out wherever help is needed. 

Case in point: twice this week my sister and I have both been able to help our dad and stepmom out. We hung Christmas lights for them on Saturday and took them dinner a few nights this week.

(Please don't think I am boasting about this, I am not...I'm just glad to be able to help out with things like this every once in a while.)

I am also thankful that I am able to serve others in my time of not working outside of my home. For someone who is never busy, I've been keeping pretty busy lately. I am blessed to be a writer of Bible studies on a team  of awesome and godly women at my church, I help lead worship both at Bible study on Wednesdays and on Sundays on a praise team, I am able to pour into ladies who are younger than me for discipleship purposes every month and I help my friend with dinner every Monday night at her house as she hosts Bible study for high school students. She feeds their minds with the Word of God and I help fill their tummies with physical food. I am so glad the Lord gives me such opportunities to serve Him through serving others, the most important being my own family under the same roof as me.

I am thankful for the freedoms that we have in our country and for a chance to say thank you for an entire day. I am also thankful for memories and pictures like these when we attended the Veteran's day parade with my dad every year. 

I am thankful for the friends the Lord has given to each of my sons, for the bonus sons they all then become to me and to my husband. This one on the right in this picture above is Alex, and we've had the privilege of claiming him as our fifth son since he was about three or four years old. He is the best friend to my sons, the additional son I never knew I needed. When I say I love him like my own, I actually mean it—the Lord gave me one of the greatest blessings of my life the day He brought Alex to our neighborhood. I am so proud of him! (Yesterday was his seventeenth birthday.)

I am grateful for Wednesday night church, for small group ladies who are my newest friends that contribute so wonderfully to our discussion on homework each week and for sharing a ride with my best friend that then turns into Lenny's after church. I told her tonight, if we didn't do things like that, we'd never get the chance to catch up! We're both so busy all the time.

Well, I'll wrap it up with that last thought. Thanks for reading my blog! Love to all.