Something you dread with someone you love... a thankfulness post

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!!  In honor of Thanksgiving want to share one of my favorite life lessons.  I'm thankful for life lessons.  :)

For a few weeks we have been talking about the overgrown blackberry bushes that run along the front of our property.  They were starting to over take the street in front of our house and then all the leaves blowing around in the street were settling at the base of all the bushes and it was a giant mess.

Last week we had a free morning, and it wasn't raining so my husband and I decided to tackle it together.  With, of course, the help of my 3 year old.  His job is primarily comic relief and responsibility for making sure that we don't get anything done too quickly.  We happen to have a smaller rake and he carried it around and talked about his special "brake".

So....   it was a nasty job.  Blackberry bushes are really a pain to deal with.  Literally.  When we were done we were both all scratched up. There was far more debris than could fit in our yard waste bin, and we ended up loading up the back of my husband's pick up truck with leaves and blackberry branches so that he could take it to the dump.  It was work.  But guess what?  We had fun.  We worked together and laughed at being tangled in the blackberries and helped each other.  We gave the 3 year old some places to use his "brake" and we had a good morning. 

You know what I'm thankful for?  Doing something I dread, with someone(s) that I love. 

I first had this realization when I was in high school.  I had an amazing youth pastor.  We had a really neat youth group with a strong sense of community.   We did all the usual crazy youth group activities together... funny scavenger hunts and weird youth group games. I was recently reminded of an unsponsored youth group escapade that involved switching the letters on our Dairy Queen sign from "We have pumpkin ice cream" to "We have nice rumps".  Good times.  We also did a lot of really meaningful things together too. Service projects that involved picking up trash, serving breakfast to homeless people, we went on several life-changing mission trips. I remember at one point realizing that my appreciation for these people was so deep that I would rather dig a ditch with the youth group than spend an afternoon at the mall. In high school. I really felt that way.

This, my friends, is how I learned that I was truly in love with my husband.  I realized that I would rather travel out to the middle of Nowhereville with him, than be anywhere else without him.

Loving relationships are empowering.  Having someone by my side who loves me and wants to walk with me through the ups and downs... that gives me strength to do things that I didn't think that I could do.

So thankful for the people in my life who have said, "This is hard. Lets do it together."