A friend once told me and I quote “I know that you civil servant earn peanuts. I make lots of money from my employment and from my side business of selling cars. I sell at least one car every week. But even with all that, you are way richer than me. “
“The reason I am holding this fund raiser is because the money I make is not enough. My one week old child has an ailment but doctors say she can’t be operated on until she is three months old. In the meantime I have to spend Kshs 10,000 every week on kidney dialysis until the girl is operated on. That is money God Almighty has saved you from spending. You are that much richer,” he continued.
“Most people keep on seeing and believing how poor they are and yet they and their loved ones never get sick and they never lack food, a shelter over their heads and clothing. They never count these as blessings from God. If they enumerated how much other families spend on illness alone, they would discover how much God has blessed them with,” he continued.
“Due to her condition, my daughter once in a while gets into these seizures where she can hardly breathe. All eyes in the family, including those of my poor infant, look in my direction as the man of the family, pleading for help. There is nothing more traumatizing like that moment when all in the family expect you, the man of the house, to save the situation and there you are, helpless and tortured like everybody else,” he blurted on.
All I could do was listen, I was speechless. I had never seen these things in that light.
My friend’s comments reminded me of the hymn “count your blessings, name them one by one and it will surprise you what God has done”.
God blesses us in many ways, including keeping diseases at bay, keeping our children off drugs, making our children to excel in school such that you do not have to bribe your way for them to get higher education, Giving our children jobs upon graduating from college, and protecting us from ills that may arise at our places of work.
And yet most of the time we keep complaining about everything, including how we are not able to make ends meet. The fact that God has saved all this money for us cannot become obvious to us because we are so short sighted.
Every day we wake up and everybody in the family goes his/her way. We then meet safely back at home, in good time to watch the evening news.
But do you know what? That whole day and even that evening we never remember to tell God “Thank You for Your blessings on me and my family”. We continue watching the news of the day, some of them very bad events like people being mugged or killed, some hit and run automobile accidents and cases of unexpected drugging.
Yet even with all these reports, it never occurs to us that the same could have happened to us and our families. It is as if the news is about those and never about us
We have so much to be grateful for every day of this life. But the many pressures, toils, struggles, demands and worries of life makes us to often forget that we have so much more to be thankful for, even all of the little things. We forget that every trial we undergo shapes us into who we are meant to be and who God wants us to be.
Thank You God for new mercies and blessings each and every day. We thank You for wonderful families, spouses, friends, food on the table, clothes to wear and roofs over our heads.
