Dear Reader:

Isn’t it strange that we can see our home every day for umpteen years and then one day we see it from a different angle and it takes a minute to recognize it as ours?

This is the far back yard of my home taken from my neighbor’s driveway who lives one street over…a lateral view. They have a ‘once-rental house‘ up for sale permanently now and workers have been doing some serious cleaning to the front, side and backyards …cutting back bushes, fallen branches and large tree limbs, varying sizes of wild saplings, and lots and lots of thick vines.

As I was driving home the other day the traffic had me backed up by this home on Country Club Blvd and suddenly there was a wide open gap allowing a view (from the neighbor’s house to the the side view of my backyard,)  I had never seen before.

It had always been overgrown with saplings, large oak tree branches, kudzu, thick vines, etc. Now there was a wide open space looking into my backyard…featuring my garage and apartment over it…and the children’s tree house!

I blinked and blinked again…I had never seen my back yard from that side angle…without all the dense shrubbery normally obscuring any view. It took a few seconds for me to register what I was staring at… it was my own back yard! It had always been obscured by any number of renters’ forests that no one ever cleaned up. I honestly didn’t even recognize my own back yard at first.

I ended up circling the block and then pulling in the ‘house for sale’ driveway. I got out of the car, walked into the  side backyard…taking this photo…a view I had never witnessed from this angle before…after living in the neighborhood since 1982. I could feel goose bumps going down my arms.

Isn’t life amazing? Every time we think we have everything figured out and we know where everything is located …we discover that one changed angle or view or scene…no matter how slight the change… can change our whole perception of our home or life as we thought it was?

Isn’t God trying to show us this every single day? We want to root down and make as few changes as possible in our lives and God is telling us, sometimes subtly or some times not…that life is change. So we better get used to it. It is how we learn, it is how we grow!

So until tomorrow….

“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living”. -Gail Sheehy

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

Today, January 19, is my nephew Lee’s birthday…named after, who else, but Robert E. Lee (his birthday is also today)…quite historical. Robert E. Lee made his name as a military leader…and Lee as a guitarist and band leader.

What an adorable family you have Lee …one of the luckiest men in the world! Happy Birthday! Love, Aunt Becky