The blessings in life

Today I went to a visitation. I know this doesn't fit the title, but just hear me out... This week I learned that a student's mom died.  She had battled with breast cancer for several years but was in remission for 4 years. She had a brain aneurism and died Tuesday night. This was sudden. She was sick, but they didn't know that she had Leukemia.  This student is always asking me for a hug, and she is always asking me when she'll see me again. Her confidence is lacking and now she will have no mom in her life to help that.  It breaks my heart. I'm not sure if this student understands what has happened yet.  I think that any time you face death, it doesn't become real until a few days after the funeral.  But this is her mom that hasn't been around for a few days, so who knows. Her face at the visitation seemed like she was kind of living in a dream land.

That same day we heard about the student's mom, we learned later that a teacher friend had lost her 3 month old son while he was at the sitters. She had just come back from maternity leave and he fell asleep for his nap and suffocated when he rolled over. This poor woman. I can't imagine the pain she must feel to lose a child.  I don't know if she'll ever get to the point where she can move on, at least no time soon.

So now that I've posted some pretty depressing things, the reason I have the title "the blessings in life" is because we must remember that the Lord gives but the Lord takes away.  We do not know his plan, but we must trust that He is good. He knows what's best, and He loves us.  Sometimes we can't see that (or rather we refuse to) because what we are going through seems to be so bad. But I need to remember that I am blessed.

This week was a particularly hard week for me. I had 2 conference nights (12 hour work days), learning about 2 deaths, drama at work, and a particularly difficult argument with Kenny. I had not gotten a single evening to be at home and went to bed after 11 every night of the week.

Still, I am blessed. I have a wonderful husband to have an argument with, I have a job that I love, I have students that I care about as well as colleagues that I care about, and I have a passion for my job that causes difficulty and drama when discussing students. Among these things I have wonderful friends, a great church, a house, food, a wonderful loving family, clothes, a great dog, and again, a fantastic husband. I know I can find more things, but the point is that I am blessed.

The hard part to realize is that even though these things are wonderful and enrich my life, they are after all, just things (yes, even my husband, family, and friends). The Lord can take all these things away from me and I still should say that I am blessed because of my God. All in all, God is what matters in my life, He is what makes my life blessed. He is what gives me hope and helps me to move on through life.

When bad things happen like losing your mom or even child, we must remember that as hard as it may be to see it, we are still blessed because we have the Lord as our Savior.