Your Gonna MISS This....

Well lastnight while watching Celebrity Apprentice with Ray, one of the contestants came on and played a song called ~ Your gonna miss this by Trace Adkins ~ after tears flowed down both of our cheeks it got me to thinking. 1 its a country song and I haven’t loved country music since the 80’s but it had a message that hit really close to home. You need to listen to it but the jest of the song is through all the seasons of our lives, we just want to get through them and on to the next season. But when we do that are we REALLY enjoying the season that we are in??

Now I know not all seasons are worth reflecting on or wanting to stay in but most are, let me explain. Since I started dating Ray at a VERY young 12 years old (do as I say, not as I do) - I just couldn’t wait to be older. I seriously thought that 16 would NEVER get there. Then I felt that I was 16 FOREVER and at 17 I got married. Then I couldn’t hardly wait to have children so instead of enjoying my first 2 1/2 years of marriage, all I could think of was having babies. Then I had 1, 2, 3 & 4 babies and much later 5 and I really couldn’t wait for them to walk - talk - play sports and so on. Did I enjoy them, YES, but looking back I wonder if someone would have told me HOW MUCH I was gonna miss those times - I wonder if I really would have hurried all those seasons of my life...

I remember being in a line at Walmart with Rachel in the buggy when she was not even a week old and I had this older woman behind me telling me to enjoy her because it will go by in the blink of an eye. I looked at that lady and wanted to tell her - I am going to be changing dirty diapers for the rest of my life, or so it seemed. Well it went by quicker then a blink of an eye!!

I NOW cherish times with my kids like I never did when they were driving me crazy all talking at once (& they do still all talk at once). I now have this (good) problem of not wanting to miss 1 thing with them. I have children of all ages now - adults that act in their 30’s and teenagers that act in their 20’s and a son that is 7 that acts like a teenager. Can I change that they are VERY mature for their ages - NO but I sure want to remind them, not so much the age they are but the time in their life they are in - RIGHT NOW - because it is going to go by in a blink of an eye -- SO enjoy it!! Seize every moment to serve the Lord with your whole heart. We can NEVER go wrong walking through life LOVING people - unlovable or lovable. Make a difference in someone life TODAY. Even if its that 2 year old that if you wipe their nose 1 more time...or clean up 1 more mess... Every time we have MOUNTAINS of laundry (and if you know us well you know that we even name our mountains) I try to be grateful for a family that has money to buy clothes and when they were little I was grateful that they were healthy enough to dirty them up & even put holes in the knees.

1 major thing that I have learned being married for 25 years and being a mother for almost 23 is to really ENJOY right where I am - RIGHT NOW!! We have had those times were we just knew the Lord had this HUGE call on our lives and on our families life and I was determined to figure it out but what we did wrong was we felt very unsatisfied in our lives at that moment because we had the dreams and visions of what our life was "suppose" to look like and we wanted it NOW!! So enjoy the NOW even if you know there is something different for you in the future. It may take a short time or a long time to walk in those visions and dreams but the worst thing would be is if you were so dissatisfied with not being at "that ideal place" that you didn’t enjoy the NOW!!

I challenge you to do something that I think will make a difference in your life. When your at a happy, fun, exciting or even not so happy time -- take a mental picture of the scene. Being a photographer I live my life seeing frames of my life and thinking of everything as a picture. For example...1 of the last nights that Blaire lived at our home we were all sitting together in our living room just cutting up, laughing till we cried, just having an amazing time and I thought to myself that I don’t ever want to forget this time with us all together. I do this all that time and I swear it works because I can think and remember the emotion of the night, the scene, I can even remember the smells of what we ate for dinner.

So now we are coming to "new seasons" in our lives, ones that will be very happy and some that will be sad. But I am determined TODAY even more then yesterday to remember that we are gonna miss THIS time in our lives so I am going to ENJOY, cherish, treasure, love every moment of my life...