A Full Heart

This post was supposed to be for Works of God Monday, but I guess Tuesday will have to do. :) My heart is full right now, with all the blessings that God has given us over the past days and weeks. I will readily admit that a few weeks back, I was going through a time of great discouragement. Mainly this discouragement had to do with Jim's lack of work. In our house, I'm the one who takes care of the bills and paperwork, and I was starting to panic a bit, as I saw our savings dwindling away. Every day, we prayed for work, and checked the job ads . . . asking God to show us if he wanted Jim in a different line of work, or to stop being self employed. This is a difficult time to be self employed in construction, and there are a lot of men at our church in the same situation as Jim. Anyway, we got a call one day out of the blue that someone wanted an estimate on a garage. Long story short, Jim estimated it last week and heard back on Friday that he got the job!!! What a blessing. He's also had some other small jobs come along right now, and even sold 2 more bread slicers! God is so good. I don't know why my faith is so small--in almost 10 years of marriage and self employment, we have seen Him provide again and again. We have never gone hungry. We have never been homeless. Yes, we've been late on bills occasionally, but He's always provided for us to pay them off quickly. He has blessed even though we are far from deserving, even though we are not nearly as good stewards of His money as we should be. So that is one reason my heart is full of thanksgiving to our great God today!

Here are a few other reasons:
* Our freezers are full of meat, enough to last us a few months! We were able to take advantage of a sale on ground beef, buying 20 lbs, which cost us about $40. That very day, our Rite Aid rebate check from last month arrived--which totalled just over $40. How cool is that! (As a side note--I spent about $30 after coupons at Rite Aid last month, and got a $40 check back. I don't think I've ever done quite that well with the rebates before, so that was super exciting for me!) We were also given a bunch of venison from some friends . . . and are well stocked with chicken breast, too.
* Julia is completely potty-trained now; she's even been dry at night for the past 2 weeks. It is SO nice to only have one child in diapers now. I am not patting myself on the back for her training--it just really clicked with her, and we're done after about 6 mos. of working on it. It took a bit longer than that with Sam!
* I am finally down to my pre-Josiah weight!!! I still have a bit that I want to lose, to get back to my pre-any-kids weight, but I am determined to get there. My sis-in-law and I have been checking in with each other on our weight loss journeys, which has been fun--always nice to have a buddy to help keep me accountable! :)
* I am so blessed to have many sweet Christian friends and family members who are young moms like me. I was able to spend time with some of these friends today, and it was such a treat to spend time encouraging and sharing with each other.

Well, I am sure there is much more I could jabber on about, but I'll leave it at that for now so I can get to bed at a reasonable hour. :) To hear more works of God testimonies, head over to Jenny's blog!