Called to Go, Willing to Stay: A Blessing Counting Journal (2)

In celebrating the one year anniversary of 10/10 moving day, I will count just 10 blessings in different categories. We believe many more are still to be unfolded as God always has a bigger plan for His children.

Before I start counting the blessings, here is the house-before according to the real estate description:

“Home is being sold ‘as is’! Spacious Bungalow in need of complete rehab! Cash buyers/Investors only! Not bank owned or short sale!Home has lots of potential on a nice lot! ”

I will just leave it as it is and allow it to sink in a bit for your imagination. We were so busy cleaning out the house, training the big boy to live at a “construction zone” as we called it, taking care of the baby, that we didn’t have time or mood to take many pictures. Perhaps, it’s a good thing we don’t remember much detail of the messy situation then. The human brain is blessed to blur the bad memories and allow the sweet ones to stay. But, definitely, our home had and still has “lots of potential” and my heart is transformed along with the house.

With gratitude and joy, I can’t wait to give my Lord all the glory for the 10 blessings in various areas as following (in no particular order):

1. Physical blessing
   “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:… a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to break down, and a time to build up…” Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 
   
   A fix-up house is labor work. Work done timely is a beautiful thing. The grass in our front yard was half my height. We filled many bags of grass, old clothes, dirty socks, expired packaged food, etc.. The garbagemen started wondering “how many more

   

   bags do you still have”… We filled our treelawn and they kept coming for weeks.
   Other hands-on jobs like cleaning, scrubbing, sanitizing, painting, building, rebuilding, moving old / broken furniture in and out, up and down, and tearing the wall down and putting in new floor…. Just to name a few:-). It’s such a rewarding experience after all the work is finished. Believe it or not, with lots of work around the house, we all felt better physically even through the hard winter time. Who needs a gym membership anyway if life itself is an ongoing active physical exercise? This is still true in many countries today. When we were in China, we rode our bikes or walked to many places. We are born to be active and energetic. We see babies and young kids love to keep moving. What a blessing to live an active life! Thank God to remind us to stay physically active through fixing a house! Also, He graciously gifted us a treadmill through the house along with many other possessions. As it is getting colder now, I am loving the time on the treadmill while listening to sermons/radio programs. He knows we would not buy a treadmill so He delivered it! Now I have no excuse for not exercising.:-) Thank you, Lord!