Friday's Fave Five #267

Hello and welcome to this week's Friday's Fave Fives.   It's always a rich time to me as I look back over the week, no matter the ease or the difficulty of it, and look for blessings throughout the day.  Then choosing my five favorites to share with you!  Please join in with me in focusing on the good things in our lives.

1.  The study we are doing at our Ladies Group.  We are doing the study Girls with Swords at our ladie's bible study group.  We started it in the fall and goodness, we were a little shell shocked in the beginning. We were all scratching our heads.  But now that we are really rolling with it we are all so glad we stuck with it.  It is a really great study.  It isn't an easy study.  It really makes you think.  And the questions really have to pondered on before you can answer.  But sometimes the things that are most worth it take work.  Too often we want the easy way out.  We want to get things right away.  But God wants us to seek and pursue Him, it won't always be easy.  It will take effort. And I think that's what I'm finally getting.  There is so much rich things in the study and it's so much fun after the effort of reading and doing the homework to get together with the other ladies and discuss what we've learned and what we've got out of it.

2.  New Program at the gym.  I go to Curves.  Yes, I spend money every month to go to a gym.  We have had all sorts of exercise equipment at home, some very expensive.  And once the initial curiosity and novelty of it passed it sits gathering dust.  But when I am paying monthly it makes me go.  So anyway, they have a new program they have started this month with Jillian Michaels of Biggest Loser fame.  And it is kicking my butt.  And motivating me.  It is tough but it feels so good when I'm finished.  Right at a time when I was starting to lose my motivation this program came in.  I'm thankful I am, at this point, able to get that money together monthly to go.  I was at a point in my life I had to do something.  I was gaining weight, I was stressed and my blood pressure was at the mid high range.  I had to do something.  Something that would keep me going at least 3 times a week and give me enough intensity to make a difference.  While I haven't lost tons of weight, I've become more fit, more toned, stronger and I've brought my blood pressure down to a consistently good range where I don't have to take any meds for it.  That to me is worth the monthly fee.

3.  Texting.  I'm very thankful for this bit of technology.  It keeps me in touch whenever me and my kids need or want to have contact.  With all of them miles away at the moment it's nice to just constantly have contact.  The blessing of kids who keep contact with me is priceless.

4.  Purge, purge and purge.  Every week this month, I've had another bag or box full of things for donating.  It feels so good to just go through closets and storage areas and get tough with myself and get that which I don't use or no longer love out of my spaces.  I get feeling very overwhelmed when things start to crowd in all over in the house.  I'm not a minimalist by any means but I don't like being overtaken by clutter either.  So I'm being tough.  Each day I add to that bag or box and then off it goes before I can change my mind.  My goal is to really get my storage areas scaled down so I can do some painting and sprucing up of them this year.  The blessing of freed up space, less maintenance, less stuff  is what I'm enjoying.


5.  Small bits add up.  Another area I've felt overwhelmed with is the general cleaning upkeep.  It dawned on me that I tend to try and take on the big jobs in one fell swoop.  With life being busy and me working full time, needless to say, certain things just didn't get done because I didn't have the chunk of time to devote to it.  So I've started breaking things down into doable chunks.  I might not be able to clean out all my cupboards in a day.  But I can do a shelf every other day or once a week.  I can't organize the whole craft room at once but I can start one cupboard at a time.  I can't unload my whole closet to sort through.  But I can look at a clothing item or two at a time and decide does it stay or go.  It has felt good doing it this way.  It's getting done.  The blessing is the small chunks of time available to me throughout the day to take those minutes and focus and do that step.

What have been your favorite blessings from the week?  Were they big obvious events or were they more subtle but just as heartwarming and encouraging?