Count Your Many Blessings

My mom sent me a text message this morning.

"Can you come to my house?"

I didn't ask why or what she wanted. I just texted back, "Yes. I can be there in 30 minutes."

As always, songs started flowing through my head.

"Make all my wants and wishes known."
"And oft escaped the tempter's snare by thy return, sweet hour of prayer."

"Count your many blessings see what God hath done."

The blessings flowed quickly and intuitively, ideas encompassed by a single word or phrase, without much form or structure. It felt unfinished, but I was driving and it was sufficient.

I visited my mom. She just wanted to talk about how things were going. I'm trying to find a house, a job, deal with the divorce.

When I left her home, within 5 minutes I had been pulled over. The driver's side brake light was out. The police officer spent a long time checking over the license and registration. I wondered how many of my recent encounters with the police had appeared on his little computer screen, and worried what he might do or say when he came back.

"How did this happen?" The officer asked as he handed back my registration. He was referring to some damage to the frame of the back window.

"It's a beater car," I said automatically, without thinking.

"A beater car?" he questioned.

"It's a junker. It's my sister's car. I don't know what happened, but I imagine they locked their keys inside and tried to open the door somehow and damaged it."

"Okay," said the officer. "Well, tell Dorothy she needs to get her brake light fixed."

He got back in his car and left, and I just sat in the car, shaking a little and putting away the registration and insurance cards. I had messaged Jon when I had been waiting for the officer to come back, and I sent another message again to tell him that it was just the brake light.

Jon's message back was cool and calm. He offered to fix the brake light when he came to pick up the kids later.

"That's the blessing," I thought to myself. "Jon wants to help. Changing a brake light's not a big deal for him, but for me it's just one more thing on my plate. And it was s a small thing. Just a small interaction between the two of us that would take us one tenacious step towards re-building trust."

Later, as I was driving again, feeling that the immediate threat had passed, I could think clearly about the implications the law enforcement officer had been making. If I had been really guilty, I would have been immediately offended at the implication. Thank goodness I'm innocent!

Fred

My brother committed suicide when he was 29. It was three months before his 30th birthday.

His death taught my family and me the importance of caring for one another. And, most importantly, it taught us the necessity of caring for our individual selves.

It was the worst way to have to learn that lesson. But even worse if we didn't learn.