Blessings and Challenges

Good Sunday morning!  It’s a rainy day here, but it will help to green the grass and bring up more of my spring flowers.  The glass is always half full for me!

I read something somewhere speaking to the optimist (the glass is half full) and the pessimist (the glass is half empty), pointing out that the glass is refillable!  It is true!  Even once it is completely full and you drink what is there and you can refill it.  That is the same with blessings and challenges.  At least that is what I believe.

As I seek to find my ‘spiritual voice’ I allow these thoughts to wash over me and try to find a means of voicing them on Facebook as a prayer and, dare I say it, wisdom.  What wisdom could I possibly have to impart on anyone?  Well, I pray that with the many experiences, a bit of googling and through prayer, I can come up with something every day that will resonate with someone.  If you wish to follow me on Facebook, you will find my (almost!) daily prayers here:  https://www.facebook.com/Janet-K-Warren-1466394873573878/

I am taking a prosperity course.  Well, it is about radical abundance, and we can be wanting abundant anything--money is of course, the one that pops to mind, but we might also be seeking the abundance of other things like friends, wisdom, fame.  Really anything.  Every class, we talk about our challenges of the previous week.  I have so few and they seem to be so miniscule, that I cannot even bring any to mind.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have had some big challenges in my life--single parenthood, near bankruptcy a couple of times, the multiple sclerosis.  But I have managed to get through all of them.  The latest challenge, is the surprise retirement.  Can I manage to live on the pension?  Well, it seems that if I didn’t have others to help out, I would be fine, but even that I am managing (no travelling in retirement just yet!).

We all have challenges and we all have the ABILITY to get through them.  Sometimes we don’t feel that we have that ability, but we do, and I believe that at least some of that ability lies in being thankful for the blessings that we do have.  I was telling the story recently that when times were tough, I liked to get money from the Royal Bank bank machine.  That was before they started to charge you to do that, if it wasn’t your bank.  I liked the Royal Bank machine because at that time, they could give you $5 bills!  When you need to get food for your kids, sometimes that is enough.  What a blessing!

It is also through our challenges that we come to truly appreciate the blessings, no matter how small.  Our greatest blessings are the people in our lives.  Well, truthfully, some can be a challenge, but mostly, they are a blessing and those that are a challenge to us, perhaps, we are the blessing to them.

Those of us who try to be blessings to others try to help those people see the other blessings in their lives, as well.  We are surrounded by blessings and challenges and need to be thankful for all of them.  Even as I write this, I curse the poorly functioning MS fingers that have caused the backspace key to be my greatest blessing!  I have learned to find the little blessings in all of my MS challenges, the greatest of which is all of the people in the MS community that I have met, including some that I have been able to help, with my little bit of wisdom learned through my own MS challenges.

So, folks, please be thankful for not only your blessings, but your challenges and I believe that you will attract your own abundance of whatever you need.  At least that is a start!  Every journey begins with that first step, followed by the next, and the next and the next.  We need to begin somewhere.  

God bless all of you and may your blessings outweigh your challenges!