I want a home. Not a mansion, just a nice, sturdy, well-built house on some land, just a couple of acres, not much, where I can cover the walls with bookshelves and fill them with books. And I want some of those books to be ones I've written. I want my husband to be able to add on to the house and fix it up just right for us and any children who may come along. I want to be able to make drapes and recover furniture and I want to have a unifying color scheme, I'm sick and tired of "College Student Rainbow".
I want enough money so that we can pay off all the bills, which admittedly aren't as much as they might otherwise have been. I want to be able to carry enough spare cash that if I fall in love with some antiqued wooden chest that I can buy it. I want to be able to not pull myself back from falling in love with something because I know that no matter how much it is it's too much for us.
I want to be able to rebuild my wardrobe into something deserving the name, not just the assorted remnants of hand-me-downs from high school that by some miracle I can still wear. I want to be able to buy and make clothes that reflect who I am and my personal tastes as opposed to being merely functional.
I want to have an effect on the world. I don't want to cause any great change, for my name to be hailed throughout centuries, but I want to be remembered, I want to make someone see things differently, understand something through a different light. I want to write books that people want to read again and again. I'm not interested in high literature or artistic purity, all too often in the search for meaning, entertainment is lost. I want to entertain, and if a bit of meaning hides itself away in there, so much the better.
I want to take a cruise. I want to learn to scuba. I want to be able to say that I have lived life, not been lived by it. I want to look back in fifty years and know that I have not wasted my few short years on this beautiful Earth.
I want children. I want them so badly that it is an almost constant ache in my heart. I want to be able to not worry about not having them yet. I want to be able to let God decide, since He's the one in charge of such things anyway. I want to be able to accept it with a free heart if His decision is that I cannot.
I want to be able to let wicked men dig their own graves, and not waste any of my time hating them. Those who do wrong will get it in the end, usually through their own actions, and there are countless numbers of bugs who are simply too much trouble to bother squishing since they'll do it to themselves if given long enough.
I want to make children laugh and enjoy the youth that is all too fleeting. I want to make dresses that are the stuff of dreams for those who haven't a great many dreams left. I want to help Cinderella make it to the ball.
I yearn to stay home. My place is not in an office, but at home. I have never wanted to work. I want to be exactly where any children I may bear need me, with them. I want to be able to do what I enjoy and be right where God designed me to be.
But still, for all this, I am grateful for my health. I might weigh more than I really want, or should be, but I don't have any serious health problems. I am grateful for my husband, for the wonderful man that he is. I am grateful that even though his health is no longer perfect, nor will ever again be through no fault of his own, that he is still with me. I am grateful that he and I are so perfectly balanced so that he is strong where I am weak and that I am strong where he is weak and that we can work together to face the world. I am grateful for his love, that I can depend on him to always love me, and for his intense desire to make me happy.
I am grateful for a family of in-laws who accepted me as one of their own from the moment I first entered their lives. I am so very grateful for the love that ties them together, and that the bickering is never enough to drive them apart. I am grateful for an over-decorated Christmas tree and the joy that burdening those branches brings.
I am grateful for Christmas carols and greeting cards. I am grateful for the tears that fill my eyes far too easily. I am grateful for puppy dogs even though they do grow up and I'm grateful for baby smiles and child giggles.
I am grateful for being childless because even though I ache for babies, having them right now would have been disastrous for my husband and me.
I am grateful for being able to sew, because I have come to understand that it is a skill not all are able to learn. I am grateful that I can make clothing that can last more than one wearing and that for some reason friends are willing to pay me to make.
I am grateful for those who write songs, because that is something I cannot seem to do. I am grateful for those who have the ability to create music through one form or another because even though I feel its strength, I cannot communicate it.
I am grateful for those who like my writing even though I have been taught to value it as nothing. I am grateful for worlds that I have not made that have been opened to me for writing and for friends who love to read.
I am grateful for a company of role-players on the Internet who have together woven a saga to match the masters. More and more I have come to realize that the players coming together was no more of an accident than the characters coming together.
I am grateful that my husband has a good job. Not just one that will pay the bills, which is a blessing of itself, but one that he actually enjoys. I am grateful that even though I dislike having to work, I am able to work and have found a place that treats me like a human being, in a field I truly enjoy, with people I like to be around.
I am grateful for a creative writing class that did worse than nothing for my writing because I wasn't the only one who already knew more than the professor could teach us.
I am grateful for God who is sovereign over all the world, who loved us enough to watch His Son die for us, and who tells us that even our sorrows will be for our good. I am grateful that God will never burden us with more than He can bear.
I am grateful for Calvary.
I am grateful for a government that gives me the freedom to worship my God. I am grateful for the freedoms that are promised to me, because I know that they are fast disappearing.
I am grateful for being intelligent enough that I can learn, and being just stupid enough to know that I don't know everything.
I am grateful for trees. And flowers. And sunsets, and waterfalls, and glittering caves, and breathtaking mountains.
I am grateful for computers and the miracle of the Internet. I am grateful for friends in places I have never been and probably will never get to see.
I am grateful for always having a place to live, even when it was under less than ideal circumstances for all involved. I am grateful for having food to eat, even when nothing looks good and I'm almost sick of Ramen noodles.
I am grateful for chocolate.
I am grateful for writing, and books, and letters, and poems, and plays, and movies, and everything in this world that involves words and language.
I am grateful for technology in all its diverse forms.
I am grateful for medicine and those who practice it. Mine are healer's hands, but I could never do what they do.
I am grateful for evil, that we might know what is right and good and holy, but that doesn't mean I have to help it.
I am grateful for the changing seasons, for all the varied beauty of the world.
I am grateful for people I cannot agree with. What a boring, useless place this world would be if we were all alike.
I am grateful for the ideals of Chivalry because even if the ideal was never reality, it still provides a worthwhile goal to strive for.
I am grateful for men who are well-taught enough to open doors for me.
I am grateful for a friend who is more Family than family and that he has become the older sib I always ached for but never had, until now. I am grateful that he and my husband are so very much like long-lost twins born miles and about five years apart. I am grateful that they are a corrupting influence on each other. I am grateful for Fang and Barka. I am grateful that he has proven true when others have betrayed us.
I am grateful for bowling. I am grateful for 50, 73, 50, 67, 68, because anything is better than 0.
I am grateful for role-playing games that allow me to explore other viewpoints, and that give me the opportunity to discuss the world and how things work with a number of people I have never met.
I am grateful for a New Years celebration that turned out to be nothing.
Count your many blessings, name them one by one . . .
� 2000
Feel free to tell me what you think. I'm at [email protected]