Thank you, Lord, that Your mercies are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness!

I am thankful that I am looking forward to getting together with my family for Thanksgiving dinner. I always know the food and conversation will be great. What a blessing to not have awkward family relationships to tiptoe around.

I am thankful to have all my kids back at home for a week. I know the days of the five of us will not last forever, and I will welcome in my new “children” when the time comes. But for now, I am appreciative for every day we have to make memories with our children who are quickly becoming adults!

One of the first steps I took toward “seriously” writing was attending a local Christian writers group in 2002. Little did I know what the Lord had in store! There I met two local ladies who asked me to join them in starting a weekly critique group that we named Life Sentence. We began meeting in May of 2003. They encouraged me to attend my first writing conference in 2004. There I met a whole slew of other writers, some of whom I now call friends. Then I joined ACFW and met even more writers, at conferences and via the web.

I am so thankful for other writers to walk with on this journey. Some I only know on my computer screen, some I look forward to seeing every year or two. Some I see often at the monthly writers group I first attended and now help lead. And six years later, Leslie, Mary, and I still meet weekly. God has done amazing things in all three of us, personally and professionally. I couldn’t have imagined it all when I stepped out of my comfort zone and attended that critique group all those years ago. God is so good!

I am thankful for organizations like Samaritan’s Purse that allow our family to participate in a small way in ministry that touches those in other parts of the world. Since my children were small, we have wrapped and packed Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. In 2006, my daughter was blessed to help pass out some of these boxes in remote villages in Ghana.

If you haven’t yet filled your Operation Christmas Child boxes, do it now! Click here to find a drop off point or to pay for your shipping online and print your barcoded box labels. This is new, way cool thing. The bar code will be scanned at shipping and you will receive an email telling you the country to which your box was shipped! Amazing!