I have a very good friend who, by choice, lives a very conservative, simple, life style. He and his wife choose to live in a rural area, in the woods, without many close neighbors.
They are both professional people and earn a good living. They just made a choice to do the things that bring them joy and less stress in their lives.

They grow a big garden each year and can, freeze and otherwise preserve much food. They hunt for elk and venison and use that as their main meat source. They don’t have television, choosing instead to read good literature, and play games and have actual conversations with each other and their children.

I was at their house visiting one day and one of their children came in and of course, as kids the world over do, wondered what was for dinner. The mom told her, and then she said, “For dessert we are having homemade ice cream”.

I want you, for a moment, to think about the whiniest voice you have ever heard, and imagine the next sentence as being uttered by that voice.

“Homemade ice cream again? Waaaaaaaa, I Hate Homemade Ice Cream.”

Upon hearing that, I thought to myself, Of all the simple, wonderful pleasures in life, homemade ice cream had to be right up near the very top. But if you think about it, if you are rewarded with that kind of thing to often then of course it is going to get old and stale.

When we think about what being blessed feels like, wouldn’t it also stand to reason that if you were totally blessed all the time, would you even be able recognize a blessing?
Sometimes blessing doesn’t mean a reward, or a feel good thing or money or anything like that. Often, a blessing is the very thing you have learned from adversity. It’s an epiphany or insight. It’s having your eyes opened to see that the very thing you stressed or even cried over could have been God making you stronger and isn’t that the best blessing of all?

I am going to add to this post a writing I did when I lost my wife. You will understand when you get to the end. I am a blessed man. I know what it feels like.

Digital cameras really are convenient. I have one of the latest models and it takes awesome pictures. I was thinking though, about how easy it is to delete a memory. We take a picture and then we preview it. If it didn’t turn out just so, we hit the delete button and away it goes. I guess that’s ok at times, but somehow it seems wrong. Yes, I do it as well, but I think about all the pictures I have from years past. We can sit around some times and get the old pictures out and look at them. Each one a memory, such as that picture of Aunt Mary with her underpants showing, or the red eyes of Uncle Dick, were they red from the bad picture, or from the booze. We took pictures with our old film cameras and we took them to the photo place and got them developed. Then we put those pictures in an old shoe box somewhere. Sure they weren’t all professional quality and some of them were stupid or embarrassing, but they were memories and they bring back feelings of that time. Now we all seem to want to be first class photographers so we delete the pictures that don’t fit that mold. How sad to lose that moment in time even if it didn’t turn out postcard perfect. We also take many pictures that are good, but all we do is download them onto our computer and leave them there. It was always enjoyable to get the big pile of old pictures out and have the family sit around on the sofa and pass them back and forth and laugh and remember. I don’t know all the reasons these things bother me so but they do. I am a huge nostalgia type guy and it just bothers me to see memories deleted even if they weren’t perfect.
What if we had a button like that in our lives? Man, I could delete that night in Portland, or that bicycle wreck when I was six. Maybe I would like to erase that fight I had with my son when he was fourteen and I said things that were hurtful and stupid. And I can’t believe I wore those shorts in 1987, my god what was I thinking. I wonder if I could erase that day at the doctors office when they first told Karen she had cancer. Could we skip right over the part with the surgery and the hair loss and the chemo. Could I delete that part when she went to be with the Lord? What of this period now when I ache so bad sometimes and miss her so much. How about that? There are many of those things that weren’t just picture perfect. Some cause us much pain and sorrow, but they are our lives, the things that make us who we are. I don’t think I would erase that stuff if it were possible. The person who is me is the whole person with the good and the bad. So many things that we would just rather not go through or deal with. Some can be very devastating, but to pretend that the bad didn’t happen I think would cheat me out of how incredibly cool the good things make me feel by comparison. Yes, there are sad times, and bad times, as well as the good times and I keep thinking about my life with Karen, and about the words from the old Garth Brooks song.

I could have missed the pain

But I would have had to miss the dance