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I was sitting in my living room this week when the walls started to shake. The pictures on the walls were falling off the nails. My husband was not home at the time so I had to assess the problem myself. I waited a few minutes and the shaking stopped. I thought, "Wonderful! No more problem!" Ignoring situations is my way of dealing with things. Five minutes later when my furnace kicked on the shaking started again. I went down to my laundry room where my furnace was located and saw that it had black smoke billowing out of it. (That's not good!) I went back upstairs and sat on the couch. My husband would be home in a few minutes and I would let him deal with it. After all, if I can't see the problem - it will go away, right? As I sat there I started to smell gas fumes. Now I couldn't ignore it. I grabbed the kids and headed out of the door. I looked back almost positive that my house was going to blow up any minute. We were all in our pajamas and I thought to myself : "These aren't even my favorite pair. If I am going to be left with only the clothes on my back I wish I would have changed first!" We took shelter in the gymnasium of our church while we waited for my husband to get home - in our pajamas. And of course it was full of people. There was a basketball game going on.
The next day the repair man came and fixed it. He informed us that we were lucky the whole house didn't catch fire. In the process of repairing it everything in my laundry room got caked in black soot. I had just recently painted and remodeled that room. So you can guess how I have spent many hours today. Scrubbing and re-scrubbing EVERYTHING!!! I look a bit like the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins.
I was frustrated! Very frustrated! Until I thought about how lucky I was to have things to scrub. You see God reminded me of several friends of mine who just recently lost everything they had in a tornado in Washington, IL. That is the town that I grew up in. As I follow them on Facebook I see the struggles they are having building back their houses from the ground up. They are having to list every item that they owned and research replacement prices for new items for their insurance companies. Can you imagine the headache of that? Yet they are not complaining. They are thanking the Lord that their lives were spared.
So today, I will scrub each item with joy, because it very possibly could have all been taken away in a fiery explosion. And I will remember that in every trial I face, someone has it worse than I do.
A blessed mess,
Rachel
I give you credit Rachel, it is hard not to complain because we do take things for granted. I am just as guilty with this. I found myself complaining of the cold when I have to go outside and then I realized how lucky and blessed I am because there are those who do not have a warm place to go to in order to get out of the cold. I do try to catch myself when I complain and stop and think of how worse off I could be. When I do this then, the complaining stops and the thanking starts! I will keep you in my prayers that you do not get discouraged or feel overwhelmed when these things happen! :-)
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