I was driving to one of the many local Starbucks in my town this morning, I had a meeting with a student and decided to get there early so I could write this blog. Actually, this is not the original blog I had in mind for today. I have been struggling over the last two days to write today's blog, every time I wrote the post I would delete it and start over because it just did not seem right. I wrote and deleted 4 blogs because I didn't feel good about what I'd written.
So I sat in Starbucks staring out the window and listening to my She and Him Christmas album trying to think of something else to write about.
While I was driving to Starbucks I came to a stop light behind a maroon SUV. On the back of the vehicle the driver had those stickers which show how many children they have in their family. This group of family stickers was different for a few reasons. These stickers were not the little stick figures you typically see pushed to a corner of the rear window, these stickers were those christian fish symbols you see on cars. Below the fish stickers were the words "Big Families Rock!" The light turned green and I quickly counted the stickers before the car drove off, there was a total of 18 fish including the parents. That's 16 kids! That is a lot of mouths to feed! If they had 16 kids why aren't they on the Discovery channel with their own reality show? And they were driving an SUV, with 16 kids you would think they might have an old school bus or something similar to fit all those children in the same vehicle.
I turned left and so did the SUV in front of me. Then I turned right, into Starbucks, and so did the SUV in front of me. A woman emerged from the drivers side door and began walking into Starbucks just behind me. I awkwardly stopped and looked at the woman, she seemed kind of creeped out by it. I asked her "Do you really have 16 kids?" "Yes we do. 6 of them survived the pregnancy." She responded. Immediately I felt like the biggest jerk in the world. I just asked this woman about her 10 children who had died. "I'm so sorry" I said, "I didn't mean to bring that up!" "It's alright, I put it out there on my car, I expect people to ask me about it." She responded. I opened the door for her and stood in line to order my coffee and that was it.
I am numb to that kind of pain, how could she continue after having 10 of her children die?
It is astounding to consider the pain she must have gone through in her life. How could she even manage to get out of bed in the morning?
There are experiences we have in life, like meeting a woman who gave birth to 16 children and had 6 survive, that inspire us to live better lives ourselves. It may be selfish of me to think this way, but I can't help to think what is there in this world that could happen in my lifetime which would compare to the trials this woman has gone through? It almost makes anything in my life seem like peanuts compared to what she has experienced.
I think God uses experiences like this to give us a trust and reliance in Him. I know that I turn towards Him even more after I have these random and sobering experiences. When I experience these encounters I want to call everyone I know and tell them how much I love them and then I want to pray and thank God that I am alive.
This has been a different post for me. I hope that you have these experiences in life, that you are able to be reminded daily and from complete strangers that the only way to live this life is to stay connected to God and trusting in Him and to have and share love with the people in our lives. There are those times in life that I am reminded to truly live and not to take anything for granted.
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