Thanksgiving Joy

We had the most wonderful gift for Thanksgiving...dear friends from our home state!!! Wow!! When you live so far away from all that is near and dear, a visit from friends is like precious gold. :-) Our friends, with their five children, were on their way home from Alaska and swung 700-800 miles out of their way to visit us. They arrived the day before Thanksgiving and we were excitedly waiting for them on the corner of the street. :-) We could barely contain our excitement....I had to refrain from jumping up and down and squealing like a five year old. We ate dinner together and sang a couple of songs together before we all headed to bed. We had to get up early so we forced ourselves to all go to bed before it got any later. Here are T & A eating dinner on Saturday. Thank you so much for all of your help A with the many dishes and all of the cooking. You helped to make all of the kitchen work so much fun. Thank you for being such a sweet, encouraging friend.

Here are all of the children eating at our table. They all had so much fun together and did just wonderful in a small house. We are so glad that our children had some time with others their age for a few days. Vision got so much exercise playing outside with them all and he loved it!

This picture was taken on Saturday evening...all of the children were drawing and it was just so sweet. They were having such a great time of it too.

This picture was taken Thanksgiving morning. The daddy's were making homemade butter from fresh farm cream. Us ladies were busy cooking up a feast in the kitchen. We had 20 people here for Thanksgiving, 12 of which were 11 years and under. We had a wonderful feast, lots of visiting, a 2.5 mile walk (just us ladies and the youngest babies) midday, and a lovely time of singing in the evening. T & A are very blessed with singing and piano playing talent and we were all blessed by it. They sang a song for us that is called 'Refiners Fire' sung by Steve Green many years ago. I had never heard it and it was a message straight from God to me. The gist of it is that we should actually long for trials and the refiners fire because it is what makes us into the image of God. Well, I didn't realize how much I dread and do not desire hard times. I am always so thankful for the growth that comes from those times, but I am almost always praying that we NEVER have to go through that again!! Maybe none of you are like that, but God really put the spotlight on my heart and I just repented and realized that I want to be willing to go through anything that will make me more like Jesus, no matter how hard and painful. Wow! Thank you so much for singing that song for me and others three times while you were here. I would recommend that all of you listen to the song online at least once. It is beautiful and the words are amazing.

On Friday we went and played volleyball after lunch and that was great to move around and get some blood flowing. :-) Then, Friday evening we all went over to some friends house and had dinner together. After cleaning up and visiting for a bit we ended the evening with rolling the piano to the living room and singing for a long while all together.

Saturday morning we all went to church together and then stayed for potluck. They left on Sunday after a pancake and peaches breakfast. We are so, so thankful that they were able to visit and felt so blessed by their stay in our home. I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving too!!