Blessed

I have a warm home.  My wife is beautiful, kind, intelligent and hard working.  She is a wonderful mother.  My kids are healthy and intelligent.  My job is rewarding and pays me well.  It comes with good health insurance.

I will not go hungry today.  I will not be cold without the hope of being warm today.  I will not worry about money today.  I will not fear the future.

I will be with people who love me today.  I have seen a child smile today.  I will perform work today that helps others.  I am able to walk and move and interact with my environment.

Because of my faith, I believe that I deserve none of this.  I am owed nothing.  I have earned nothing.  If I was lying in a gutter, homeless and alone, deaf and blind with pain ravaging me at every moment, I would still have nothing to complain about. 

Below is my paraphrase of a devotional I recently heard that sums things up pretty well:

"When you have given as much as Jesus did, then you can complain."

It would be easy to say that many of those things I call blessings really come from luck or coincidence, with a little hard work thrown in.  It is not a hard arguement to make.

But there is no luck.  There is no coincidence.  There is only providence.  I have been trying to purge the words 'luck' and 'coincidence' from my vocabulary.  Each day that passes demonstrates that they are words without a real meaning.

It is possible that someone will read this post and scoff at my beliefs.  Go ahead.  I am okay with that.  I will not hate you, laugh at you, or even think less of you.  I will think of you as misguided.  All of us are misguided about something we believe.  The bugger is that you are usually convinced you are right until that moment when you realize you are not.

We each have a choice that needs to be made.  All my chips have been pushed to the middle of the table and I am surprisingly content.

I will sleep well tonight.