So yeah, you know that saying… stop and smell the flowers or roses or whatever it says. That’s how I’ve been feeling lately. Our family has taken a couple of short vacations over the past few weeks and we’ve really been enjoying ourselves. It feels great to just get away and enjoy each other’s company. Quality family time is really important so even if you can’t afford anything extravagant (we definitely couldn’t), just getting away and enjoying a change of scenery makes a difference.
I think this is important especially when you’re going through a challenging season in life. Regardless of what may be going on, God still wants us to enjoy life. He’s blessed us with so much and we must learn to enjoy it. Taking our little vacations also made me think of a few things in regards to our fertility struggles. I noticed that all we had to do was plan, get in our car, and drive in order to get to our destination. Sounds simple, right? Well it wouldn’t have been that simple if we had an infant. Traveling with an 11 year old and traveling with an infant are literally like night and day. We would have had to make several more stops than we made if we would have had an infant. Packing probably would have been much more of a task for me as well. Of course if we had an infant we would have made it happen and would have enjoyed every second of it. However, the point I’m trying to make is we need to stop and just think about what we have now and be thankful for it.
Although we want a baby and want to be pregnant, we should enjoy this season that we’re in right now. We should enjoy the portion that we were blessed with because once this season is over, that’s it. I think sometimes we’re so caught up in the “next season” that we don’t see the beauty in the season we’re in. So my advice to myself through all of this was “Stop and smell the flowers….or roses or whatever the saying is”.
A cheerful heart is good medicine,
but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.
Proverbs 17:22 (NLT)
Kristen D. Johnson
