blessed, truly blessed!

I know that I am blessed, but sometimes it is the small things in life that really make me think how fortunate we truly are. Yesterday I had the opportunity to work a shift at a mom to mom sale at Kris' moms church. My mother-in-law has been trying to get me to sell some of Owen and Wyatt's clothes and old toys and baby gear at these sales for quite some time. I kept putting it off and putting it off, until we finally realized that we either needed to submit an entry to TLC's "Hoarding Buried Alive" TV show, or try to sell or donate the clutter that we had......SO I decided to give it a try. It didn't help that I really didn't have the time to label and organize the hundreds of articles of clothing, or sort through the mountain of baby gear and toys.......so the preparation for this sale basically consisted of me hiring our babysitter for a few hours to come and do it for me. Notice the title of my post is "blessed", I'm sure no other mom had the luxury of having a babysitter do all of the dirty work for her. Kris took several loads during the week and met with his dad so that all of the larger items were already in Canton. On Friday night Kris loaded everything up and headed to the church where he set everything out for the sale. He was such a trooper, although he complained more than once about how he would just prefer to donate everything to salvation army, and that likely this would not be worth the time or energy. However, I knew that I wanted to give it a try- so Saturday morning I headed down to Canton to work my shift from 11-2pm. I had the check-0ut shift so I basically took all of the clothing off of the hangers and took all of the safety pins out of the clothes and took the tags off of all of the items and gave the buyer a grand total of the purchase. It was a fun job to have and the time sure did pass by quickly. BUT.......... I couldn't help but to feel bad for some people.....I mean, really I had no idea what their exact situation was.....for all I know they could have been millionaires living in a mansion with maids and gardeners.....but I don't think this was the case. There were a lot of women there with children varying in age looking for spring/summer clothing for their family. It was really hard for me when I would get to a certain point in their order and they would say, "okay let's put this stuff aside for now, can you please total everything up so far and let me know where I'm at?" And this was at the time of the sale when everything was an additional 50%off so most of the clothing wasn't more then $.50 or $.75 cents each. Or when I would come up with a total number owed at the end of their order and they would say, "no that's not right, I came up with much less then that!", when I already did the math in my head and on a calculator and the amount that I quoted them was indeed correct. Or when I would be commenting on how cute the clothes were that they were purchasing when a third of the items had small stains or tears on them. Or when some of the toys were so old and worn and the mom would tell me that she was going to try to clean it up and/or fix it up and put it in her childs Easter basket. I know I have it good in my life. I attribute most of what I have to the way that I was raised. My parents did an excellent job of being tough but fair and not giving in too much, though i must say I pretty much got what i wanted because i was the baby. But a lot of it is that I am truly blessed....not to say that I am a better Christian than any of these other women who were at the sale, if anything I am probably not as good of a Christian as half of them, and yet I have SO much more! I pray everyday, mostly at night. I pray with the boys before i put them to bed and I'm always sure to pray with them thanking God for our many blessings, including our nice house, our nice cars, our nice camper, but more importantly for a healthy family and for continued safe travel. I want to instill in the boys at a young age how blessed we are and how hard Kris and I work for everything that we have. So again, I'll never know the exact situations of the people that I checked out at the sale, and it isn't any of my business......but I know now that every time I go into a store I'm going to be a little more thankful about the opportunity I have to be able to buy full priced clothing, or not worry about what my total comes to at the grocery store, or whether I am going to be able to pay all of the bills at the end of the month, because God has provided for us in a way that makes us blessed...truly blessed!