Open Letter 8

[Spinderella]

Year of 2008,

In spite of all that was going on around me, you turned out to be a great year full of blessings and lessons.

You helped shape and redefine many relationships in my life and gave me reasons to use many gifts that had lay dormant and untapped for many years.

2008, you subtracted and added to my life in ways that are way too mind boggling to comprehend or explain to others. The only explanation for you is that this was truly a year of 'footsteps in the sand'. I truly experienced the presence of God and can clearly identify the precise moments I walked with and was carried by the Lord.

Thank you 2008. I eagerly anticipate the New Days, Fresh Anointings of 2009.

[9dstpm]

Dear 2008,

Overall you have been quite good to me. Even though I got seriously downsized at my job and we had to do without a LOT of our creature comforts for a minute, I am blessed to be working even if it is only a few days each month. A lot of my friends (social workers and otherwise) are not working at all. When I look back and realize that even though we don't have as much as we did in 2007,we are still here, we are still healthy, and we have each other. So many people do not have that.

This year I was blessed with a beautiful baby boy. I am so blessed to have him even though he's starting to enter that trying phase (trying to walk, pulling up on/pulling down everything, putting us out of church for making too much noise, etc) I love him just the same. And while I'm talking about children being trying, I am just as blessed to have my teenage son too. He is a wonderful big brother and I pray that 2009 will keep him just as even keeled and as honest and respectul as he is now, even though he's starting to show some signs of teenage amnesia (you know, I ask him to do something and he just "forgets").

And even though I am still looking high and low for a full time job, I will not be as stressed about it in 2009. I've come to realize that maybe I'm supposed to use this time to be the type of mother to my baby boy that I wasn't to my older boy. Not that I was a bad mother, but being a teen mom at the time didn't afford me the time to spend with my son like I should have. I was too busy working 3 jobs, going to school, and overall proving to everyone around me that I wasn't gonna be the welfare mom that everyone said I was gonna be. I'm blessed with Hubby who's blessed with a job that is able to support the family. I thank God so much for that because 10 years ago, everything fell to me and I didn't have anyone to talk to at the end of the day or just say, "hey, I understand."

So as we count down to 2009, I thank God for all the blessing that He's given us and I pray that He continues to keep us in the new year.

9dstpm