Eyes on the Prize

 I'm floored this year only has seventeen days left in it. You might be one of the many people that are counting those days down eagerly, awaiting the new year with excitement like never before. It seems like just yesterday it was January and I was settling into my new counseling job nicely, faithfully searching through real estate ads in my spare time. Now here I am in a new town, new house, new county, new church, ANOTHER new job, new cars and half the pets we moved here with have passed away and we have 3 new ones. It's amazing what you can accomplish and what changes you can adapt to in a short amount of time if you really work at it, isn't it? 

           This leads me to the point of my post today. Like most people, I am not immune to romanticizing things to the point where when it does finally happen, the real experience is strongly lacking compared to the imagined. I've dreamt of living in a place out in the middle of nowhere for years. I know for a fact I romanticized the "country living" life.  With all the tasks we have frantically had to work at to ready our property for winter and horses, I have become so lost in frustration, bills, tiredness and left wondering, is this really what I left everything behind for? I traded one rat race in for another. I had to stop and force myself to really think about it. Last weekend we visited our family's back home for a combined Christmas/Thanksgiving get together. It was so wonderful to see everyone but it was a well timed reminder of that yes, where I moved to IS everything that I wanted, it just is a different kind of country living then I had envisioned. And I think that's really what the problem is. We get very specific ideas in our head of what we want and even when we get something equally as good as what we had envisioned, we are not happy with it because it isn't exactly how we envisioned it. For example, many people day dream about the type of person they might meet some day and marry. Often times their spouse ends up looking and acting nothing like what they had dreamt about but that doesn't mean they aren't happy. This is how I feel. This leads me to my second point. 

     At the end of the day I am so grateful to the Lord for how he has provided for us, time and time again. I am even thankful for these worries I've had because it's kept my focus off the happenings in the world, COVID 19.  I've got some bad news for you guys. 2021 is not going to erase COVID 19. You are probably thinking "duh, I know that". But do you really? It's the norm now to pass a stranger at the grocery store and joke about how all the bad things are happening to us simply because it's "2020".  Regardless of your personal opinion on the severity of COVID, we can all agree it's disrupted nearly every persons life. However, there seems to be a growing belief that somehow the new year will bring less troubles and this is such toxic thinking. A new year is not going to rid of COVID and neither is vaccine. It's time to focus your attention somewhere else. Where does your hope lie? What are your goals? Is COVID 19 really  getting in the way of your goals? Unless you are trying to start a new business or travel internationally, I highly doubt it. And if it is, maybe that means  God has a different plan for you. For me personally, I am so excited for the new year so that I can start to relax a little bit from all the frantic winter prep and focus on some more anesthetic goals I have for my property. I'm excited to watch my drug and alcohol support group grow and I'm excited to hit some financial goals that previously went out the window when we moved. I'm not going to stand around allowing COVID 19 to steal my joy. 

What are you looking forward to next year? 

-L