earned blessings

I walked away from church on Sunday feeling really good about the message I heard and I wanted to share it.

Our message was about earned blessings...or rather that there are none. The bottom line is that good things happen to good people, but bad things happen to good people too. Those of us who faithfully pray, attend church, and do all the right things still have bad things in our world. Those of us who attend confession, take communion, attend every mass there is, and volunteer for every cause there is will still have bad things that happen to us. That is life. It is easy for us, myself included, to fall into the "why me" trap and wonder why our God could do "this" to us. But it is important for us to remember that we are but a small piece of God's puzzle and "who are we to question His plan"?

There have been many times in my life that I have asked "why does this happen" and several times I could have screamed at the top of my lungs "why has God done this to me". I am not saying I haven't asked these questions as I cry myself to sleep a time a two - but it never ceases to amaze me how down the road the picture can be so crystal clear.

In 1999 Chad was in a "terrible" accident. I was one week past turning 18, I was not equipped to deal with that. And, if I had to do it again I am not sure so sure I could! But, I was just naive enough to manage without much damage to either Chad or I. While in college I would often double as college student and girlfriend/nurse when needed. Weeks before our wedding I had surgery to have my thyroid removed because of a "tumor" that my doctor found, which turned out to be nothing more than a scary cyst. A week after that Chad had a pretty invasive surgery (again) and we weren't sure how he would make it through the entire big day of our wedding! He was sick on our wedding day, and suffered through our first dance!! These are the little things that seemed kind of big at the moment! Then...Charli was diagnosed with cancer. I quickly realized that all that "crap" we dealt with to make it through Chad's ordeal was simply 'on the job training' for what our life was going to go through in the coming months. Having said that, it does kind of make me worry what that was training us for!! But even now, I can see the good Charli has done through her cancer. The lives she has touched have been countless and still counting.

God works small and large miracles and while sometimes the blessings and curses can be the same, in the end God is always there to pick us up and dust us off to start new. And it is important to realize that we are not in control, we have never been in control. None of us get what we "deserve", as our pastor put it Sunday -- none of us deserve to be where we are, we all have what we have because we have been given gifts from God. Our education, knowledge, skill set, and personal traits are all gifts from God, He gave them to us, deserving or not. I can only think of how different my life would be if I only had the things I "deserved" rather than the abundant gifts from God I have.

I am sorry if this was rambling...I just really wanted to share the message from Sunday and the entire time he was talking about blessings all I could do was hold Charli, look at her, and smile in amazement of the blessing God delivered in our first born and wonder...what have we done to deserve this, and then I was quickly reminded that I didn't do anything, she is a gift.