Little Reminders

Last week I was in a horrible funk.  I was tired of being tired all the time. (The alarm goes off at 5:00am. And Steve leaves for work around 6:20am to try to beat some traffic and be at the school by 7am.) I couldn't seem to get anything done, yet I didn't want to do anything.  I felt blah. I had a hard time finding the motivation to even read my scriptures (I hate to admit that, but that's how it was).  Then we were asked to give a talk.  Well, really, we were asked last week, but we didn't know what day or topic.  The bishopric member said he would email Steve about it.  And he did, but it went to Steve's spam folder and so Thursday as I was cleaning up lunch Steve called me to tell me that we're speaking the next day and that we had 20 minutes each.  Our topics were discipleship and hope.  I chose discipleship, since my family has been reading The Promise of Discipleship by Neal A. Maxwell.  I had slacked a lot in reading the book since moving from Carthage, but I picked it up again while I've been sleep training Miss A so it was perfect to talk about it.  I think I was on low.  I really needed to get going and just do things.  Preparing for this talk in short amount of time was a bit intense.  That's basically all we did Thursday.  Big E got to watch a show before dinner and a movie after so that we could prepare.  Somehow I had 20 minutes of material.  I don't think that I've ever given a 20 minute talk before.  Preparing for the talk helped to get me out of the funk and get moving and doing what I should be doing.  I haven't felt blah since then, which I'm really thankful for.

And on Friday as we were on our way home from church we saw this:

"It would just be heaven if it really rained," I told Steve as I took the picture.  As Steve was about to turn to get to our road, he saw lightening!  And while we were preparing lunch we kept hearing thunder.  It made me so happy to just hear thunder.  The wind picked up also.  As we were finishing lunch, kids started screaming and laughing outside, so I went to the window to see what was going on and there was rain!  Rain in Doha in September!  So we went outside to enjoy it.  The temperature dropped quite a bit and it was very pleasant outside.  Big E didn't want to get wet in his church clothes at first.  He wanted to get his swim suite on, but after a minute of explaining that the rain might not last that long, he eventually went out in it.  Miss A was content to have her dad hold her in the rain and didn't really think much of it. (It was really more of a heavy sprinkle, but we'll take what we can get.)  It was wonderful to stand in the rain.  The weather here has been pretty unchanging for the last 5 weeks we've been here.  Almost every day is clear, sunny, and hot.  Some days are humid, others dry.  I could probably count on one hand the days were there have been clouds in the sky. So the rain was amazing!

And I think those two things are little reminder to me that we are being watched over by a loving Father.