Tis the season for everything to break...and to be thankful for it

Everytime I visit someone else's blog I come down with a severe case of "blog envy." For example, just the other day I visited my friend Shawna's blog and what has she managed to post? Her whole wedding album! I don't even know where my wedding pictures are! And to add insult to injury, here it is two days past Christmas and my blog is still covered in fall leaves because I can't remember how to switch my background.

But that's not at all what I want to write about. I just had to get that off my chest. Really, I think Shawna's wedding album is beautiful and someday I plan on kidnapping her and forcing her to show me how she managed such a feat.

You know how Paul says, "give thanks in all things? I am going to attempt to do just that, despite the fact that this has been a very broken season.

Rewind one month. Imagine this. Our family, along with three others rent a picturesque cabin in the Great Smokies. The fall air is crisp, the autumn leaves still hang on the trees. The cabin is spacious. There is a TV in almost every room. The one downstairs is set in an alcove above the fireplace. This is the kid's room. Mom has worked all day preparing a pot of chili for 12. The baby is napping blistfully in the next room so she decides to relax for a moment. She fixes herself a piece of strawberry cheesecake and settles into the lazy boy. Up goes the leg rest back goes her head and then BANG! A scream of terror sounds from the floor below. Mom flies out of the armchair and runs down the stairs to find the TV and all of its accesories lying facedown on the floor. The nine-year-old is obviously guilty. But how? Mom demands an explanation. Nine-year-old is speechless. Mom screams louder, in front of the other three families, mind you. Nine-year-old begins to stammer out something about a lost DVD and not wanting to bother relaxing mom upstairs. Piece my piece we recreate the scene of the crime. He stepped on a suitcase so he could reach the TV, he moved it to the side in the hopes of retrieving the DVD that had slipped behind the set, when bam he lost control. The TV came hurdling to the ground, narrowly missing the seven-year-old. It was dead. All attempt to revive it failed. Mom and Dad were out $320. Nine-year-old is sentenced to three years without an allowance, plus menial labor. How to be thankful for this one? Well...if the baby had been down there he could have been crushed. Or it could have been one of those rediculously over-priced flat pannel deals instead of a $300 WalMart special.

Then one day, not long after the falling TV incident, the garage door made this mournful whirring sound none of us ever had heard before. The next time we tried to open it, it refused to budge. It too was dead. And how you ask, might we be thankful for this one? Well...we can be thankful for the garage and its willingness to shelter all our junk. For the extra refrigerator and deep freeze that faithfully cool our surplus food, the piles and piles of camping equipment that keep us entertained in the spring, the seven bicycles and baby trailer that keep the flab off our legs, the widgets and fidgets Dad uses to keep our house from falling apart, and the countless other extras that find shelter in our garage.

A day or too after the garage door bit the dust, a friend pulled the door handle off of my van door. Mind you the door on the other side was already broken. So now, I have two broken sliding doors. One that can be accessed if you reach your arm through the driver side door and unlock it manually from the inside, the other which is hopelessly stuck shut. This of course, makes for much seat scaling on the boys' part, which always leads to dirty seats, knees in noses, random kicks as one boys climbs over another and general mayhem. Of course, this one is easy. At least I have a vehicle that starts and stops when its supposed to. I can't tell you how many women I know in the housing projects who would work if they just had a car that ran.

Now this last one. This one was a biggie, at least for me in my little housewife world. It was two days before Christmas. My mother-in-law was already here, her husband was on his way. My mom and brother were due as well. The turkey was thawing nicely on the deep freeze in our faithful little garage. The ham slept peacfully on the bottom shelf of the extra fridge. The trimmings, though not yet made were floating around like pages of a cooking magazine in my head. I wanted to get a running start so I could relax a bit on Christmas Day (remember where relaxing got me last time?), so I decided to start baking. Non-chalantly I walked to the cabinet above my oven where I stored my army of cookbooks. I reached above the stove top to grab a few favorites when out of the corner of my eye I perceived a crack in my glass-top stove. No, it was more than a crack. It was a crevace, a great yawning maw and nearby lay the guilty flashlight that had plummeted off the nearby refrigerator on to the stove. I gasped in horror. Visions of a stuffing-less turkey and gravy-less mashed potatoes flashed through my mind. Christmas was ruined! How could I cook without a stove? This was too much. I refuse to be thankful for this one, Lord. But here too, gratitude was found. After several phone calls to the cooktop experts of Huntsville, we discovered the uncracked burners were useable until the top could be replaced. And even that wasn't going to cost as much as we first thought. Christmas was saved thanks to a little ingenuity with a skillet and some crockpots.

"Now may the Lord of peace Himself continually grant you peace in EVERY circumstance."
2 Thesalonians 3:16