Blessed Beyond Measure

I try to think often of the many blessings in my life and every time I do, I am amazed at the abundance of them that I have each day.  Especially while we are in the midst of great transition, God has provided for our every need.  I could make a list a mile long of our blessings, but it has really been on my mind lately the generosity of our church family at West Dyersburg.  When we arrived here a few months ago, the Frazier family had offered for us to stay with them.  I am very well aware that it is no small offering to let two adults, three children under the ages of 5 and a cocker spaniel stay with you for an endless amount of time!  And we also had offers from various other families.  We weren't sure how long we were going to be there and they seemed to be perfectly content with that.  Their daughter, Lauren, gave up her bedroom for us to sleep in, both of their daughters played with our kids for hours on end, Lauren babysat our kids while we looked at houses, Gail cooked a delicious meal for us almost every single night, they let us use their washer and dryer whenever we needed it, Mike showed us house after house until we finally found one that we wanted to make an offer on and the list goes on!  I even set their house alarm off one morning at 3 am when Toby, our dog, woke me up to go to the bathroom.  I didn't realize that the alarm was on and I woke up the entire household of sleeping people!  I was so embarrassed and I thought that they were going to kill me!  But they just laughed and said "guess that officially makes you a part of our family now!"  Our dog used their living room carpet and their ottoman as a back yard potty area!  We were so frustrated with this because he had not had an indoor accident in years!  And not once did they act upset.  They just said "well, that is just part of having dogs!"  (They have an indoor dog as well, which is the reason we think that Toby went a little crazy)  Anyway, my point is that God blessed us with a family that was patient, kind, loving, encouraging and that made us feel so welcome.  In the end, we were the ones who decided to leave and they wanted us to stay even longer.  We could not have felt more loved and blessed as we did during our time with them, and that was exactly what we needed as we moved to Dyersburg.

As we were feeling more like we needed to get out on our own and trying to decide where to go next, two different families came to us saying that they had places for us to stay.  One had his mother's home that was fully furnished since she had moved into a nursing home and another had an apartment that had just become vacant.  We ended up choosing the apartment because it was so much closer to town and just a few blocks from the house that we are trying to buy.  So not only did God provide for us, but we even had options!  And the apartment was rent free for us until we could get moved into our house!  It has been so helpful to have people in the church to use their blessings to bless our family.  What a difference it has made in helping us settle in!