A Blessed Life

I was eating gumbo from Chris’ last night and got to thinking about my blessed life. I know gumbo doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I remember living for years in California or Florida or Mississippi when you couldn’t get good gumbo at a fast food place. I’ve lived back home since 1981 and that’s a blessed thing. Then I came across the above photo. 

I can look out my window from my air-conditioned room and see a forest of green in summer and changing leaves in the fall.  I have been able to work out of my house for years and spend most days with my lovely wife. I guess that makes up for being away for months at a time in the waters off of Vietnam. I have a beautiful daughter, grandkids and great grands. They all live around me. Harvey seems to be headed to Texas and not Acadiana. I am blessed.

I think being blessed is really an attitude. It’s the ability, that I don’t always have, of spending an appropriate amount of time looking up and looking down. 

I need to spend more time looking up at my great God and getting validation and inspiration from Him and not from a rapidly collapsing world system. I need to look “down” on a world full of folks who can’t even conceive of a life like mine. I can’t comprehend waking up with my family in a garbage dump.   

I need to somehow use these upward and downward views not as a cause of satisfaction, but a call to action. The only purpose of blessing is to be a blessing. I need to remember that standing or sitting during the national anthem, having Obama Care or Trump Care, whether statues of the long dead stand or fall,  aren’t really matters of eternal significance.  Wondering if there is any gumbo left over, probably isn’t the most important issue of my day.  Jesus wept over Jerusalem, I wonder what he’s thinking today about me in my air-conditioned room and those kids waking up in a garbage dump. 

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