Grateful

Wow, its been sooooo long since I've sat down to do this.  So much running through my head and heart I'm not quite sure where to start.  Its been a crazy month filled with lots of work.  Work of the paying kind is done for now.  So its been time to refocus on my family, and house, and friends.

I was vacuuming this morning and noticed a book I have propped up on my piano.  In large letters it says GRATEFUL.  Its title is Grateful, voices from our Katrina Kids.  I keep it sitting their mainly because I often walk by there and see the word grateful and it reminds me that I should daily feel that for the life I've been given.

I'm being reminded again by a book I'm reading for our church book club.  It's "All Over but the Shoutin" by Rick Bragg.  Written over 10 years ago I'm sorry its taken me this long to pick it up.  It is his memoir, the story of growing up in the south.  Not the romantic, entitled south.  But the dirt poor, struggle to stay alive south.  But alive it is.  Ricks Mama gives every bit of her being for her children.  She works her fingers to the bone and does without, so that they can have something to eat, and clothes on their backs.  His Mamas extended family is their safety net, there to pitch in when his mothers efforts just couldn't be enough, though they themselves didn't have much more.

Rick says " There is a notion, a badly mistaken one among comfortable people, that you do not miss what you never had.  I have written that line myself, which is shameful to me now.  I, of all people, should know better, should know that being poor does not make you blind to the riches around you; that living in other folks' houses for a lifetime does not mean a person does not dream of a house of his or her own, even if it is just a little one.  My mother ached for a house, for a patch of ground, for something.  When I was a young man and we would take drives through town, she stared at the home of others with a longing so strong you could feel it.  She stared and she hoped and she dreamed until she finally just got too tired of wanting.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to do.  It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.  While my mother will stare you  dead in the eye and say she never thought of herself as poor, do not believe for one second that she did not see the rest of the world, the better world, spinning around her, out of reach."

And reading that makes me grateful.  Grateful that his words open up to me a world I've not lived in, helped me to understand more of the culture I now call home.  Grateful that even in the depths of poverty he and his family were provided for.  Grateful that somehow his mother believed in Jesus even with year after year of adversity.  I'm not sure my faith is that strong.  Grateful that I am not left in my comfortable life, thinking my biggest problem is what TV will we use in the living room if we move the one thats there to the bonus room so the boys and all their friends can hang out there.  Aaaaargh and that is the place I so easily go to, taking what I have for granted and even wanting more.  Grateful when I'm reminded that I have more than enough and I see the opportunity to share it with others.  Grateful that I am so incredibly blessed  in so many wonderful ways.