Written by: Allison Redmond
As I sat in front of a generator-powered fan on the ground floor of our house…
I thought about how miserable I was.
No electricity. No AC. No internet.
My mom had to dump everything that was in the fridge and most of the stuff in our kitchen freezer.
I was hot and grumpy. Nothing was good enough.
But as I sat in the basement (which was the coolest room in the house) I thought about the people on our M25OC home delivery route…
The people who live in apartment buildings with hallways that smell like cigarettes.
The little boys who rejoiced over a box of cheese, a loaf of bread, and a bunch of bananas.
I wondered how they would handle losing power for four and a half days. What they would do if they had to throw away all the food in their house. Because, chances are, they don’t have a fully stocked pantry. They probably don’t have enough grocery money to replace everything in their fridge.
Then, I thought about the homeless people who sleep on the square in downtown Mansfield and how they had to weather the storm.
And I felt guilty.
Sure, it’s inconvenient that we lost our electricity. Sure, it’s frustrating that we had to throw away hundreds of dollars’ worth of food. But we still have more than enough.
God has given us more than we need. He has blessed us beyond measure, yet we still whine and moan at every little difficulty.
Across the street, there’s probably someone who would do anything to trade their problems for ours. Someone struggling to make ends meet while we’re complaining that we don’t have air conditioning for a few days.
It’s ridiculous, really, how we let our problems blind us to God’s blessings and to the suffering around us.
Lord, give us eyes to see.