All three of my kids are sick this week and today I find myself grateful. Not for the sickness of course, but because I realized this is the first time my kids have been sick in 2012. Autumn went six and a half months before she caught her first cold, a blessing I really appreciate considering the large quantity of formula she’s consumed in her short little life.
But my gratitude brings conviction with it—I can’t help but wonder how many times I’ve thanked God this year for our good health. Not enough, that’s for sure. I hate the way it often takes the removal of a blessing before I’m aware of what I’ve been given.
This year the MOPS leadership team is reading a book called 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, which is mainly about author Jen Hatmaker’s attempt to recognize her many blessings and the responsibility that comes with them. An added bonus = she’s hilarious, especially when she has to give up her beloved coffee (the horror!). But at a serious point in the book she describes the sinking feeling she got when she discovered her kids had tossed a perfectly good dinner in the trash because they were out of ketchup. She and her family were in the process of adopting two children from Ethiopia and the contrast struck her: “I wept for all my children tonight, my Ethiopian children orphaned by disease or hunger or poverty who will go to bed with no mother tonight and my biological children who will battle American complacency and overindulgence the rest of their lives. I don’t know who I feel worse for.”
At first glance, we feel most sorry for those struggling through extreme poverty. And the poor absolutely deserve our compassion. But what about those of us who are so accustomed to good health and clean water and an abundance of food that we assume they’re a given? In light of eternity, are we really better off? The apathy Hatmaker sees in her kids is in me too. But when I take a step back from the comforting distractions of American culture, I know that God has blessed me so I can turn around and bless others. Not just soak up all the goodness for myself.
I don’t know why I have so much when there are millions with so little, and to be honest, I’m not completely sure what to do about it. But at the very least, I want eyes to see my blessings, and ears to hear Jesus when he says a true believer produces a harvest that multiplies thirty, sixty, a hundred times over.
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