tonight finds me looking back...

at my first blog and reading old posts that a girl just like me wrote on a night just like tonight.  It was a post I wrote as the summer was ending and the fall was beginning, and the days were getting shorter and I felt that I wasn't using my time wisely enough.  And the thing is, as I read that post I realized I am still that same girl.  I still feel like I am a slave to my tasks and I am not focusing on what is important.  I don't particularly enjoy laundry, vacuuming, or dishes, but they have to get done and my perfectionism forces me to get them crossed off my to-do list instead of just letting it go every once and a while.  I had written a prayer to Him at the end of that post and said it was my new purpose statement.  Well truth is, it has been three years and I still feel like I am back where I started.  So I am going to end this post once again with my prayer.  And I really want to make sure that three years from now I am not sitting here feeling like I am still in the same place I once was.  I want to change my life for the better, starting one day at a time.  And I know some will be good days, and some will be bad days, but I want them to be His days...

Jesus, this is still my purpose statement, one that I tell You from the very depths of my heart.  I want to be a wife first and a mother second, and a housekeeper very dead last or perhaps not even at all.  I want to treasure my children not a sparkling kitchen, I want to bake apple pies with them and go see the animals at the zoo.  I want to sit on the floor and read book after book and make a tower with blocks so high and knock it all down just to build it again.  I want to lay in my husbands arms at night and feel his heart beating and the rise and fall of his chest, and be content with who I am.  I don't want to feel lost anymore, I want to feel like I am truly myself for the first time.  Please help me to give it all to You each day.  To find rest in You alone.  To go from strength to strength, and every one of them Yours.  Please help me to feel content with the busyness of work and commuting and the chores that have to be done and keep me from focusing on them as if they are all that my life consists of.  Please help me not to be consumed with the day to day but to be consumed by You and the blessings that you have given me each day. Take my life and let it be consecrated it all to Thee...