Count Your Blessings, name them one by one

This post has been months in the making, but I still don't know exactly how to write it. So here I go. I hope it makes sense.

The song "Count your many blessings" from church has been on my mind a lot lately. Over a year ago, Mariah heard the song in church and wanted to learn it. So, for the next few months we sang it with gusto before scripture reading, during family home evening and randomly during the day. It is a favorite at our house and has seemed to come up at all the right times that I needed to hear it ( like after I discovered all my kitchen pans had gone to recycling...I'll save that story for another day). Ruthie has been especially good about sensing when I need to remember my blessings and I will catch her singing or humming it at the perfect moment.

Life has not been difficult for us lately, but it has been...life. That means my idea of what should happen doesn't happen. Somethings are easier than others. So, with that being said, I would like to count my blessings.

One... Living in Iowa. As many of you know, Matt applied for a job at BYU this year. It was with mixed feelings, but something we felt like he needed to do. The night he found out that he didn't get the job Ruth suggested singing count your many blessings before prayer without knowing that anything had happened. While I felt a huge amount of relief about our life being settled, no one likes being rejected, and Matt and I were both feeling low. However, the kind reminder of "when upon life's billows you are tempest tossed... count your blessing", made it a little easier. UNI has been good and we really like the community here. We are proud to say that we are from Iowa and love living in the heartland of America.

Two... Our soon to be home. After we knew we would be staying here, we started house hunting. Cedar Falls is a very unique environment for home hunting. While Iowa has one of the lowest costs of living- it does not hold true for every city. There are so many reasons we love Cedar Falls, and that is why everyone else loves it and wants to live here too. With our budget in mind, there really weren't a lot of houses to choose from. However, we found one that had a lot of what we were looking for - with a catch. The homeowners wanted an August 26th closing date. School starts here on the 18th of August and this was in May. We put in a competing bid on the first day the house was shown and got it, but also didn't have a lot of room to negotiate.

Three... Wonderful friends. The closing date really wasn't too big of a deal until we found out that we would not be able to extend the lease of our home and the we had to be out of our rental by August 1st. I was upset because now we had to move twice and figure out what to do with our family. We would have just gone on a long vacation, but with school starting early and my kids going to a new school, it wouldn't have worked well for them. However, just after we found out, some dear friends said - come stay in our house. They are on vacation for a month and will return just over a week before we can move into our house. They are an answer to our prayers. I'm so grateful to the many people who offered to help with cleaning, moving and helping in anyway. Other people offered to let us store some extra stuff in their garage. Blessed, blessed, blessed.

Four...Summer work. Matt has had a busy summer. Not only has he been helping and preparing to move twice (once already completed), he has been busy working. While it is true that summer is usually a down time for professors, Matt had so many opportunities to work, that he had to turn some down. He worked for the University of Missouri and spent a week at a writing retreat to start the summer. When we got back, he started attending meetings for some grant work that he is part of ($ hello new living room couch $) and then followed it by teaching two summer classes here at UNI. He finished with grades the Monday after we moved all our stuff into storage. He has been amazing.

Five... Callings. Just in case he wasn't busy enough, Matt has been called to be the Seminary teacher for this fall. We are all excited. He attended a training meeting in June and was told that he needed to memorize all the scripture mastery by the end of June and have the Old Testament read by the next meeting - August 13th. He is almost to end of reading and it is fun to hear him recite scriptures at dinner. I know our family will be blessed, even if we don't eat breakfast with dad anymore. I also was recently called into the Young Women. After serving in the primary for a few years, it almost feels foreign, but I am excited.

Six... My children, who have somehow survived all this craziness and still play, laugh, and smile with as much enthusiasm as ever. I love them more each day.