Blessings Cry out from a Laundry Basket

Joy Begins with a Thankful Heart

Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. 
I Chronicles 29:14

Have you ever looked at your stack of dirty laundry and then at the heaping basket of clean folded clothes thinking that it is like multiplying rabbits. I do two to three loads a day! I can never keep up. I put one load in the washer, another in the dryer and run out the door. When I come back I do the same thing. Today when I looked at the basket I saw the basket differently. Instead of complaining, thoughts came flooding into my mind of how many blessings that basket reminds me of.

We have more clothes than we need, hence the 12 load week. We have clothes for school, church, play, sports, night time clothes, linens for the bathroom, linens for our beds, linens for the kitchen, even linens to clean the house that we live in. To wash my clothes, there are hundreds of kinds of washers and dryers to choose from. We have running water and water heaters to make our clothes clean. There are many kinds of soap to choose from, liquid or powder and laundry softeners that come in liquid or sheets. We live in the minority of mankind!

Most families in the world don't have multiple sets of clothes for their family to wear, household linens or choices of household appliances to do our daily chores for us. If they are blessed, they have access to water, it might be clean water for drinking, bathing and washing what clothes they do have by hand without soap or softener.  They consider themselves blessed if they can find a school for their children to attend. School activities, sports teams or music lessons is beyond their comprehension. For most women of the world, their focus is how they will put food in their childrens' mouths, clothes on their back or any kind of medical care to keep them alive.

The tasks that we find menial and mundane take up so much more of their life for they do everything by hand. With grateful hearts, they cook what little has been given to them or what they have found in someone else's discarded scraps. We are a blessed nation, with little thought to all our immenities; bounty of food, shelter and "things" that fill our finite minds and energy.

Do you realize that on any given day, there are MILLIONS of men and women who would trade their life for ours in the blink of an eye. We have untold freedoms, homes that are not cardboard boxes or shantys, cars to take us from one destination to the next not our own two feet? Don't fool yourself for one moment, we have little to do with how blessed we are. God allowed us to be born in the United States!!! All that we have has been given to us by HIM! When was the last time you thanked God for all the blessings in your life or do you spend most of your time with HIM asking for one more thing?