What is value?

Is value interpretive?  Is it cut and dry?  Black and white?  Or is it all perspective?  I am talking of all things within God's laws and values.  I am talking about good things.  Good things to do with your life, your time, your energy, your love.  Is there a good, better, best?  I think I find my value in some very different areas than most.  I think it is safe to say I have NEVER gone with the flow.  Or fit in any where or at any point in my life.  And I have devoloped into a woman that is very much that way.  I am not the 'typical' woman persay.  I don't love shopping or shoes or care to have a career or like to watch reality t.v.  Though I do enjoy a good mani, pedi session and getting dressed up and having a night out.  So I feel like there is some balance in my life.  But on the day to day I find value in saving money, feeding my family healthy, making as much from scratch as possible, staying at home and taking care of my children.  In my mind "a penny saved is a penny earned" and if I can save my family money that money is just as good as the money I could make out in the 'real' world.  But actually it is even better because I get to be here for my children, have a relationship with them, have time to spend with my children and husband, I know where my food is coming from, what goes into it and that it didn't come from the freezer section at the grocery store.

I grow my garden, have a milk goat and raise some turkeys for meat.  It isn't much though it is alot of work I know there are those that do more but they usually either have a husband that helps or older children that do.  So for one person I do as much as I feel like I can at this phase of my life without completely interrupting the balance.

But what happens when God unites you for all of your life with someone that just does not have that same value system, what ever that value system may be?  When the one person you love and live with does not support or even remotely find value in those same things.  When for them going and working a job is more valuable than any of those things.  That having a pay check and making the neccesary sacrifices that go along with that pay check is the only thing that will make them happy.  I feel I am confronted constantly with this problem.  I then feel I am confronted with a decision that needs to be made.  Do I do that which I value or that which the other person values?  Is there a happy medium?  Or is it just black and white?  These are questions of which I do not posses the answers.  These are questions that I don't know if there really is a 'right or wrong' answer.  If there was I would have made it.  On the outside looking in one might be able to come up with a reasonable solution but without all the ins and outs of the matters you probably cannot see the stalemate I feel I am in.

I had a person once tell me that  "I was just lucky to have found the perfect person and to have had a successful relationship".  This person has obviously never been in a relationship with one person for over a decade.  Or they in their ignorance would have surely learned by now that there is no such 'luck'.  There are no perfect people.  There is no one that is 'the one' that will forever into eternity make your life complete and utter bliss.  Those fairy tales are for the books.  The reality of it is that relationships are hard, they include, sacrifice, selflessness, forgiveness, mercy and even the depths of dispair at times.  They are not always beatiful and probably more ugly than most would like to admit.  BUT if you can do those things, not in perfection but even some of the time there are true moments of beauty that make their way to the surface.  And for those moments we continue on and try harder and do better and sacrifice and forgive and make those hard choices.  Because you know that you too will require those same things granted to you and when it is returned that is when the beauty truely shines.  And I guess that is my real answer.

Sorry birds. No Vaccancy!

Weeding the garden one evening this little guy gave me a scare.  He is such a cute bugger and he gave my husband and I good laugh. 

Just hanging out on his front porch on a nice evening.