The Blessings Keep On Coming

I'm a woman of faith. I believe in doing the best I can to keep to the straight and narrow. I'm far from perfect, but try my best. I also believe that blessings come in many forms and for many different reasons. My greatest blessings are my faith, family, and friends.

In my faith, we believe that self reliance is one of many components that can bring peace and security, helping us to have a happy life.

My family and I have been working together to make self reliance and provident living a priority. My husband and I have made choices between needs and wants. We have recognized when patience towards having an extra is best. We keep each other in check when the desire to keep up with the Jone's becomes too tempting. We have said no, to a lot of unnecessary things and expenses recently, for the sake of having a yard our kids can play safely in, plenty of emergency and daily use food on our shelves, and the ability to grow and sustain our own food.

For a year now, we have been putting our extra money and time into turning an unsafe and unsightly back yard into a level and lush place for our family to enjoy and cultivate. Things have been slow, for this is not an inexpensive endeavor. But as we have been doing this, with the mind set of frugality in other areas, we have seen blessing after blessing help us keep the yard costs down.

Bid after bid, I found someone who could fill and level the yard for a third of what all the other companies were charging. And they did a fabulous job.

Friends and neighbors gave of their time and sweat to help remove huge weed trees that required three chain saws running, a boom lift, rope, and brute strength. This saved us hundreds of dollars.

Another friend/neighbor with years of experience installing sprinkler systems helped my husband plan out and get materials for our sprinkler system at, again, a fraction of the cost compared to professional installers or even the big warehouse stores.

Then my dear friend, mentioned as one of my provident living tools, has a special gift for being in the right place at the right time which leads to finding unbelievable deals and steals! On a walk about two weeks ago, she came across a house in our neighborhood that was having their backyard grass and curbing removed to put in a new back yard landscape. Bravely she asked what they were going to be doing with their sod they'd just cut up. Off to the dump it was going to go! She told them that I could use it and got us in touch. The funny part, it turned out to be one of my other good friend's parents. People I have a close friendship with. They allowed us to use their truck and we got all that wonderful grass and curbing for free! A lot of which has been laid with the help of our friends/neighbors who see us doing the work from their windows then drop what they're doing to come help. I'm so So SO grateful for our friends!

I believe that when we say no to something that truly is in the "want" category, we are blessed with BIG YES's in the "need" category.