Today, I sit with a grateful heart. I am currently sitting in my newly designated office space in my third floor turret overlooking the last bit of remaining brightly colored foliage with a million cluster flies buzzing around my head, and all I can feel is thankful. Getting to this part of the year felt like a constant uphill hike most of the time, and that took a toll! I have felt it in my mind, body, and spirit as every single part of me was stretched and pulled. There have been tricky relationship struggles that have kept me up more nights than I can count. We have been faced with challenges that have kept us turning daily to our Provider day after day through very uncertain times as business owners. We stood in our yard faced with destruction of our property that demanded action and attention. We faced our own thoughts of mortality and questions for the future of the world as we know it.

Has this year been harder than others? Yes. It surely has. A challenge or two is normal. This year has provided more lessons shoved into a crash-course than I really care to fully recall.

But I’m coming up for air and I hope you are as well. Because we made it this far, and there were honestly days I didn’t know how to envision the next week, let alone October.

I feel stronger. Do you? I feel like we endured something and grew some muscles through the process. Today, I will walk up out to my deer stand and sit quietly waiting for the opportunity to harvest some provision while I simultaneously soak in the healing of Creation and challenge my body to toughen up and my mind to settle into quiet.

That is a challenge, is it not? To choose to rest and be at peace and accept where we find ourselves. To move beyond asking for things and instead, just listen for answers and accept peace.

There’s been a golden thread weaving its way in and around my heart ever since the world went wonky. Through all of the chaos, there are nuggets of joy. There are dreams being born. They sit silently, like a treasure waiting to be noticed and harvested. They are the whispers of our God — reminding us to see the provision, the precious pockets full of hope that we still have, the beautiful moments of life and joy woven throughout the journey.

Yes, we can talk about the struggles all day long. We can fret and conjecture about the days to come as things ramp up in our country. We can find the ways we disagree and wallow in the yuck of it all. OR, we can make the conscious effort to be the treasure hunter, the harvester of hope, the one who finds the joy and shares it around the table and allows others to feast on it.

As I sit here, I am watching the very first of the process of our new barn being built. The new lumber will be shaped and lifted into place and somehow, this image in our minds of a new structure will turn into a solid and beautiful shape within just a few weeks’ time. A new beacon calling us all home from wherever we find ourselves on our land. It is being built on the old foundation made of stone and concrete that was created decades ago that I was told gets stronger with time. This solid base has seen a lot — there are stories of death and life in that place. And on its strength and stories, we create a new thing — an even better thing. One meant to withstand decades of storms and pummeling winds and weighty snow. We take what we had and we watch it become better.

It turns out, we needed the storm to take down what was unstable and unsafe for us, and force us to rebuild and allow something even better into our world that we hadn’t even imagined for and never would have prioritized for ourselves.

It’s just all a part of our story. The hard parts make the story better, right?