Sunday, January 07, 2007

Too Blessed to be Stressed

One of my Christmas presents was a journal with the heading, "Too Blessed to be Stressed." Just looking at the journal makes me happy.

Isn't it the truth?? Aren't we all "too blessed to be stressed?"

Today I took Tiffany to meet up with her friend so she could catch a ride back to Baylor. When we got there, her friend, Autumn, asked if we were hungry and would like something to eat. Since neither one of us had eaten and we knew Autumn's grandmother had cooked, we eagerly accepted.

As we went into the house, I realized that we were walking into Big Mama's Sunday dinner. The entire extended family was sitting around the dinner table eating their weekly meal. I had a brief second of, "Oops, we're interrupting."

Fortunately, that brief second was swept away as Autumn's mom and "Big Mama" quickly pulled seats to the table, set a place for us, and told us to help ourselves to the pork loin, meat loaf, cabbage, black-eyed peas, neck bone, salad, stir fry veggies, and corn bread set out on the table.

I felt completely at home as they opened their doors to us and immediately continued their conversation, which now included two more people. Big Mama's house reminded me of going to my own Grammy's house on Sunday afternoons when I was a little kid--everything was home made, including her amazing loafs of bread, served complete with her home made strawberry jam. Mmmmmm.....mmmmmm.

It was a wonderful afternoon. An hour and a half after we had gotten there, Tiffany and Autumn packed up, Ken told me I was now family, and Inez and I exchanged phone numbers so that I could join them for Sunday dinner again.

Days like today I realize I am really blessed. I have friends, family, and pseudo-family. The people I am blessed to have around me are genuinely good people. And God continues to bless me with new...and neat...people in my life.

So, the fact that I don't have my syllabus written for the graduate class I start teaching next week, the 394 emails I have in my inbox because I went on vacation for a week (let's hope the majority of those are spam!), and the seemingly endless pile of work I have to do shouldn't stress me out because
I'm too blessed to be stressed!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you get the syllabus done? Are you teaching a different course or the same one as last time? And I just wanted to thank you again for taking me to work on Saturday...especially now that I know how busy you are!!! :-)
--Rachel--

Janet Morrison-Lane said...

Nope. Didn't get the syllabus done. ...and I think I just lied...I'm no longer "too blessed to be stressed!" :) Same course as last summer, but of course I had to change textbooks and change up the course. I've got to keep it interesting--for me and for them! :)