What I Can't Come To Terms With...

I picked a winner for the giveaway!!  I wish EVERYONE could have one!  I was happy that it was a sweet friend Amanda...Amanda constantly remembers the lives of so many special little ones who have passed and often generously passes her 'winnings' on to others.  I hope, hope, HOPE she is as blessed with this win as so many have been blessed by her!

We've been back in Florida now for a week.  I spent the week working on eight million things we needed to do for our house in Maryland.  Without detail, it is enough to say that it was expensive.  On my checkbook and my heart.

My heart is the one that's not so easily replenished, and yet...somehow, it always is.  Typically through friends who help, friends who visit, friends who care and friends who understand.  For those things I am very thankful.

In most instances, I'd even say I was blessed.  In fact, I almost ALWAYS say I am blessed.
Blessed by friends.  Blessed with Luke.  Blessed with motherhood.  Blessed with material things.  I never say I'm lucky (unless it's bad luck, and that, I seem to have in spades!) because I don't necessarily believe in 'luck' per se.

I believe things are purposed.

Usually.

Because here's the thing that I've been regularly wrestling with these days.  I'm talking several-times-a-day-regularly.

To me, saying, "I'm blessed," is to use it in the terms of 'being divinely or supremely favored or fortunate'.

And, without question, I believe that I am.

But...I also think, "So does that mean that orphans are not divinely favored? Or that those who get adopted are more blessed than those who languish, even to the point of death?  Those women who desperately want children but for whatever reason never get to hold them are not  divinely favored? Bu Women whose husbands don't come back from war are not divinely fortunate?  One baby survives NICU and another doesn't, so the family of the survivor is divinely shone upon and the other family gets the crappy leaf picture on their door and is out of favor with God?"

I don't buy it.  I can't.  I can't buy that a God who loves us all (and the Bible is very clear that He does) picks and chooses who has food on their table and who doesn't because He favors one person over another.  Or decides who has running water or clothes and who doesn't because He is showering blessings on them (and conversely, NOT showering blessings on those who don't).  Decides whose baby survives and whose doesn't because He favors one family but shuns the other?

Obviously, it's not as black and white as that, but on the same token, it sort of is.  Why does one woman get 'gifted' with several children and another with none?  Or maybe worse, dead ones?  The one with many children?  Calls herself blessed.  The one with none?  Probably not as easy for her to say that.

I just don't know.  And, I know there are no good answers on this side of Heaven either.

But, I DO know this:  I am no more special than any person on this planet.  And that I live in a country where things are SO abundant and easily accessible is, to me, luck.  Purposed, no question, and a blessing to me, yes....but NOT because I am more favored than someone else.  I find myself more and more uncomfortable saying that I am 'blessed' because I do not ever want to give the impression that I deserve more than anyone else; I certainly don't.  I have a pool in my backyard.  Children all over the world don't even have water to DRINK, for crying out loud....and my kid PLAYS in a pool of it. Daily.  My heart rejoices for the sheer 'blessing' of it but aches for those less fortunate and 'favored' than we are.

So I don't know what to say.  I am grateful, I can definitely say that.  Very, very, very thankful.
But to say that I am blessed because of things I have and that others are not because of the very same things they don't have seems sort of like a quiet way of saying that God gives me more (or less) because He loves (favors) me more (or less).

And that's very hard for me to wrap my head around these days.