Sometimes (too many times), I find myself feeling like a kid on December 28th.
Not a kid on December 25th. Not even a kid the day or two after Christmas.
A kid on December 28th.
When the new PlayStation is a little less shiny.
When the Barbie doll gets a snag in her hair.
When the book I waited months to get my hands on has an ending that leaves me hanging, already dying for the next one in the series.
In April of this year, I got married. I turned thirty-one a week before our wedding day, so as you can imagine, this was an answer to years of prayer. Of waiting. Of sending my wish list to my Santa in the sky, hoping this was the year I’d wake up to find that gift so many of my friends had already discovered beneath their hypothetical Christmas tree.
This year, I got it.
And a week later — maybe less — I already wanted more.
I found myself wishing my husband made just a little more money. That he could be just a little more healthy. That his taste in movies and furniture was just a little more like mine. That he had just a few less sports jerseys so I could have a little more space for my own stuff.
Some of these desires are valid. My husband has dealt with multiple chronic health issues since his childhood, and that’s not an easy thing for either of us to walk through. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to share common interests with your partner, or even with desiring deeper financial stability in a struggling economy.
God wants us to carry our hopes and burdens, even the smallest ones, to Him. It’s not the wanting in and of itself that’s the problem.
The problem is that if I could somehow measure the weight of my wanting beside the weight of my gratitude, the scale would come up embarrassingly unbalanced.
So every once in a while I have to make myself stand in the middle of my yard during a sunset, spend a few seconds taking in the breathtaking scenery around me, and then thank my Heavenly Father — the giver of every good and perfect gift — that I’m in the middle of living a life I once only dreamed about.
It isn’t perfect. My husband isn’t perfect. Our marriage isn’t perfect.
But it is good, and it is worth praising God for every single day — including the hard ones. Because even on those days, He has already given me the best gift of all.
And there’s nothing in the world worth wanting more than Him.
Psalm 95:1–2 (NLT)
“Come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come to Him with thanksgiving. Let us sing psalms of praise to Him.”
ABOUT THE BLOGGER:
Kati Lynn Tena grew up in Chester County and graduated from Oxford Area High School. After earning her bachelor’s degree in writing from the University of Pittsburgh, she returned to the area and got a job working for a local library. Seven years later, a man walked into the library looking for DVDs and complimented one of her tattoos. In April of 2025 Kati married this man, and the two of them are currently living the love story God wrote for them in an adorable little house on the same street where she was raised. Kati currently works part-time doing marketing for a local youth center, and she spends the remainder of her time hanging out with her husband and friends, working on her own writing and art ventures, and slowly improving her Spanish.