Blessings AND challenges

Every night before our children go to bed we gather as a family to pray. Each of us take a turn praying for whatever is on our hearts at the time. These prayers can be very different, sometimes funny and sometimes sweetly heartfelt. My 3 year old has been known to pray for things like ,"help everyone to get there hair done" and " help Momma to make me strawberry milk". My 8 year old, who has a tender heart, tends to run along the lines of asking for protection for the people she loves most (which is Daddy) and her cow and calf. My 14 year olds prayers are mostly from memorization. Because of her special needs, she often says the EXACT same prayer every night. My husband and I have gently reminded her that it's good to learn to pray from the heart, to be sincere in what we say to God. She's learning to change it up a bit. :-)
One evening my husband said something in his prayer that really struck a cord with me. He asked the Lord to give us courage and strength to face the blessings AND challenges that would come with the next day. I really began to think about that. Taking the good with the bad. We love it when God showers down His blessings to us, rejoice in the things that "go right". But in all actuality it is the challenges we face that really let us shine. How we face up to a problem we're having at work, with our kids, or something as silly as the car breaking down or my daughter spilling her milk at the dinner table all over everything on the table, is where we test our mettle. I don't know about you but my days are chock full of blessings and challenges! Just yesterday, I faced the challenges of dogs who got into the trash, my 3 year old shoving a small bead up her nose and getting it stuck there (yes, really), goats getting out and into the barn, eating a half a bag of feed, making a huge mess in the milk room and making me chase one in particular (Etta Rae, who else??)for 30 minutes. And the blessings of having an extra day off from school, spending hours at the park with friends in the sunshine, finding some really good bargains at a yard sale and watching a movie with my girls.
Now the real question is, how did I handle ALL of it? Well, let's just say, thank God I'm STILL a work in progress! Just ask my husband who had to go retrieve the garden rake from the neighbors pasture because that's where it landed when I threw it at the goats. :-/

Truthfully though, I am learning to accept and handle the blessings AND challenges in my life with grace. Some days are better than others, but...... He's not finished with me yet.