I Am Undeserving

The Lord has blessed me in such immeasurable ways, that I cannot begin to understand them all, let alone re-pay him.

I am grateful for my husband, he is loving, considerate, passionate, hard-working, he cares deeply about our welfare and gives his all to provide for us. He is also less-than-perfect in all the best ways for me. Working to overcome my pride and take care of his fragile heart, have made me a better wife and woman in general. I love him so completely.

I am grateful for my kids. I am blessed with three amazing children that I get to watch grow and learn every day. I am also blessed with one brilliant, defiant son from my first marriage who challenges me to grow farther and fastest than I ever imagined. I am also blessed with 5 step-children who amaze me with their capacity for respect and forgiveness. These nine beautiful souls have touched my life and my heart and caused it to grow beyond my comprehension. I love them each so dearly.

I am grateful for my rental home. I am blessed with just the right amount of space to teach my kids and let them be safe exploring outside. We have enough room for all our kids to be comfortable at night, even if they all come visit at once. We are in a good neighborhood and enjoy our neighbors.

I am grateful to have two cars again. It is truly wonderful to be able to go to the library and the homeschool coop while my husband is at work, without having to wake everybody up at 6 am to get ready and take him there. I am grateful that these cars are well-maintained and will last us a good long while, barring anything unforeseen.

I am grateful to have reliable internet service and a computer. I am blessed to be able to have the resources to build a business that I can run from within our home. I love being able to care for and teach our children, as well as hopefully have the means to provide the extra income we need to pay down our debt and save for our own home.

I am grateful for cellphones. I am blessed to be able to talk to my husband and other family members regardless of the distance between us.

I am grateful for indoor plumbing and a hot water heater. I am blessed to be able to drink and cook with clean water, and shower in very warm water.

I am grateful for our refrigerator and freezer. I am blessed to be able to store and preserve foods, so that we may eat healthy food.

I am grateful for our furnace and fireplace. I am blessed that my family can be warm at night, even when it’s 5 below.

I am grateful for many other temporal blessings that the Lord has provided my family and I. Perhaps I will continue counting them another day.

For now, Blessings to You, and Thanks for stopping by!
Sarah

That Love-Hate Relationship With Our Tech

Our personal technology gives us more information and less wisdom. We have endless, instant access to information. But we do not allow ourselves the off-grid time to process that information into anything more than knowledge. Leaving us knowledgeable fools, lacking wisdom and depth.

We are allowing others to think for us, groupthink was the term from 1984, if I remember. When was the last time you used a meme to chose or reinforce your position in an issue. A meme is not wisdom, it is almost a clear opposite to wisdom. Usually memes are emotional sound bites, made to stir up our heart into taking an ideological stance. But our heart was not designed for reasoning!

If we were to debate all the pros and cons of an issue, we would come to a logical conclusion that would be somewhat near the middle ground. But allowing our heart to be swayed by guttural sound bites throws our belief system to the extremes. We have chosen a path without engaging our own reasoning. Instead, we are relying on the fully formed opinions of others. These others clearly do not have our own best interests in mind, after all many of them are proven to come from other countries. They have their own agenda, in which they want your blind support. Why are we letting them think for us?

Part of it is laziness, but only because we are so busy and stressed with our own everyday problems, that we “farm out” the thinking, debating, reasoning, and reflecting of national or global issues to other sources. And though I could go on about how we become too busy and stressed to do our own thinking, I think I’ll save that for another day. (I should mention that both the problems of being too busy, and succumbing to groupthink are among my struggles, which is why I write about them.)

The brunt of it is, I know that each of us are highly intelligent creatures. To be clear, I’m not talking about IQ as it’s measurement of comparison with each other. I am referring to our God-given gifts of thought, logic, and reasoning which were reserved for man alone upon this earth. We need to take back our own individual thought processes. Cease from allowing our beliefs to be based on someone else’s fully formed opinions. And grant ourselves the down, or off-grid, or unplugged time to come to our own conclusions.

And forget not that “if any man lacks wisdom, let him ask God.” James 1:5

Blessings,
Sarah