December Days - Tis' The Season to be Grateful

Do you know where I am blogging from right now? I'm blogging live from my home. The orginal home. The home that burned to near ashes nine months ago and I can't tell you how grateful I am to finally be home.

Though our home seems like a storage unit with piles of boxes stacked upon our surrounding walls, I can't feel help but feel a sense of peace and solace. This is our home and I couldn't be more in place though everything is out of place.

We officially moved back in the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and moved our entire family and about 75% of our belongings from our rental to our home. It was a bittersweet holiday for our family. We still drove to my cousin's home 2 hours away and still had the traditional Thanksgiving dinner and still had the best time amongst our family as we mingled and shared stories that made headlines in our family circle. We still wanted our children to celebrate despite the fact that we were in the middle of the most challenging moves our family has faced with.

We spent the entire holiday weekend moving our funiture, unpacking boxes, and waiting - waiting for the internet connection, waiting for the cable, waiting for our mattresses. Just waiting a frustrating wait. Time stood still in our home and seemed to never tick away, leaving us with the same problems on repeat. It was frustrating and it was hard.

Eventually, everything we waited for soon came and little by little we started to feel home again. There are still many things we are waiting for - calls, emails, response to many questions and uncertainty, but all those things are irrelevant so long as we are home. Home - something I haven't been able to relate to since coming leaving nearly 9 months ago.

But life still goes on, children must go to continue to go to school, I have to finish my semester off, my husband continues to work, and I continue unraveling and rebuilding the life that was once built to perfection.

Many times this past 9 months, I wondered why such a horrible thing happened to our family. And I wondered why people speak so badly of us, despise the devastating events that happened. Then I realized that everything happens for a reason. Perhaps, this event happened to remind me that everything is replaceable so long as my family is in tact with all it's imperfections and that there are seasons in life where we must weed out the toxic from the beautiful.

We've been given an opportunity to start all over again, exactly where we started. A clean slate without compromising our life that we intended for when we moved into this home 4 years ago. We've been given the opportunity to do it right this time. This time our lives and our home will be filled with a lot of love, understanding, and gratitude encompassing the family who resides in it. Everything else is just gravy.