I love watching the Andy Griffith Show. It takes me back for about 30 minutes to a simpler time with fresh baked apple pies and porch sitting in the evenings. It does a heart good to slow down and swing on the porch taking in photographs of the day instead of swinging through life catching small glimpses of a week that got away from us. I say it to myself all the time, but we are just too busy. We have too much going on everyday and we have forgotten how to enjoy daily life. We live all year for our vacations, where we can escape for a week and leave all our problems behind.
This past Saturday evening, my friends and I gathered on my front porch in rocking chairs and piled up on my porch swing to just talk, share laughter and celebrate one’s birthday. We sat in the dark by citronella candles and the blinking of lightning bugs throughout the yard just catching up with one another’s lives. It’s cheaper than therapy and it leaves my heart overflowing with gratitude and my legs covered in mosquito bites.
This morning I got up earlier than usual and stumbled out of bed to make some coffee and take a couple of Tylenol for a nagging headache. I grabbed my Bible and made my way back to that porch swing covered in pillows and sipped on my coffee as I flipped through the pages of scriptures. As I sat there praying for friends and pondering on what to write this morning…wanting to make sure that it was from God and not just something to fill a posting day schedule, I kept being filled with gratitude amidst a nagging headache and realizing I had stuff that needs to be done.
I am blessed.
Is my life perfect? Nope…but I have so much to thank Him for on this Tuesday morning.
Everything doesn’t always work out the way I planned it and I don’t get everything I want in life, but God always gives me what I need and He is ever so faithful to show me the simple blessings in my own life. It’s not just the “big” blessings or the miracles in our lives that we can look back and see…but it’s the daily simplicity of a life in Christ that tastes better than Aunt Bea’s fresh apple pie. It’s those moments when we are doing absolutely nothing that we are reminded that He is everything.
So very often we stay so bombarded with schedules and appointments and an ever growing to-do list that we forget to simply praise Him. We catch glimpses of God instead of taking photographs in the camera roll of our mind and then we wonder why we feel so overwhelmed by life. God didn’t tell you to leave your problems behind, but to cast your cares on Him and when we praise Him, our problems fade into the background. When He is the focus of our lives, everything else falls into place.
In the midst of whatever you have going on today…praise Him. If that just means sitting on your porch swing in the silence thanking Him for the birds singing or the kids sleeping past 8 o’clock. Maybe you need healing in your body or a God to intervene in a situation. Whatever it may be, praise Him.
Praise Him on your porch swing, in the office or at the kitchen counter. Whatever you do…just praise Him and thank Him for being everything you simply need in an over complicated world.
