But We Never Gave Up.

 Each day we kept getting out of bed and taking one more step

toward becoming the parents of our daughter.

Eighteen months and a surprising, but successful high-risk pregnancy later, my husband, newborn son, and I met our daughter.  One I came to know her, I realized having her in our life was worth every moment of difficulty and frustration.   I mean, just look at that face. However, it is not just adoptions that require us to keep making the choice for love or purpose or whatever it is that we are really choosing.  Just recently I got my advent devotional, Lighten the Darkness, published as an e-book on Amazon.  Now in the writing and publishing world, this was a very small project.  It only took me a year from start to finish.  That being said, there were many days when I just got bogged down in it all.  I would feel tired or apathetic and be tempted to just let the project fade away.  And then there were the days when I desperately wanted to finish, but got caught up in the mire of editing or copyright legalities and would just feel stuck.  Some days there was more crying and banging my head on the keyboard than writing or productivity.

But something inside me felt this project was important enough to wake up each day and keep moving forward with it.  I had to keep choosing to write, keep choosing to publish.  After 365 days of choosing, I met my first goal.

Now there are some things in life that are worth choosing, but don’t have a nice neat ending.  We choose to continue to be married to our love and then make choices each day that support this state instead of destroying it.  Or we choose each day to parent our child, even when they are on our nerves so badly that we are tempted to instead muster up enough cash to flee to Mexico.   We choose to get up and work another day at a job where we make a difference, even when no one notices how much we give.  All these are very “in the trench” endeavors.

This is on the whole hard, sweaty work that is often more than we ever bargained for.  Work that often involves more tear stains on the keyboard than the Kodak moments we had envisioned.  But still we keep choosing.  We choose love and purpose and life because in the end they are so worth it.

Sometimes we talk here about the need to let things go or say “no thank you.”  But today I wonder what is so important to you that it is worth getting up and choosing again every single day.  What are the things that bring you life and love and purpose?  Those things?  Hold on to them.  Don’t give up on them.  For somethings are worth the choosing.

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