11-14-12 Blessed

“How are you?” someone asks.

“Blessed,” we say.

What does that mean? What does it mean to be blessed? Well, I’ll tell you what I think, but first some background:

Last week the safety switch on our well pump switched off, and so we dutifully checked our well depth. In a 40-foot well, it’s just not a good thing when the tape measure hits water at 38 feet. So we skipped showers that night, and the next morning we were thankful to find water at 32 feet. Kind of.  I mean, eight feet of water is much better than two feet, but it’s still not very much for eleven people. Dad figured out that in our well, eight feet of water means about 75 gallons, and it regenerates in about six hours. That means it seeps in from the ground around it at that rate (whatever that rate is. I’m sure well-drillers would know much more about this and have much more sophisticated terms than I know of.). With rain not coming and not coming (Grandpa’s new tile, back here, is still not running!), this is a rather concerning issue; we’ve been doing some research and looking into what’s next.

Meanwhile, we switched into Major Water Conserve Mode.Think - paper/styrofoam plates/cups, one-minute showers (my research revealed that a one-minute shower uses about two gallons of water) catching shower water to flush the toilet (I really did), recycling dirty dishwater to flush toilets (we really did), combining toilet flushes (it ain’t pleasant, but it’s better than not having water for showers, let me tell ya), and fewer larger laundry loads has lowered our daily average water usage (per our water softener record) from a whopping 310 gallons per day down to 228. Which means we haven’t switched off the pump again which means the well is keeping up with our consumption.

Whew.

We are blessed!!

We are blessed to have a well at all, unlike some who have water hauled in and stored in an underground cistern (which, incidentally, we might eventually have to do if the well fails completely…).

We are blessed to have fresh clean water.

We are blessed to have plumbing to bring that delicious clean water to our home, where, at the flip of a faucet, bingo! we have water!

And - - -

We are blessed to have this marvelous machine (pictured below) which uses a scant twelve (12) gallons of water per load. Unlike our previous standard one (30something gallons per load), I can do laundry even though our well is failing. There were years, before we got this Hi-Efficiency machine, when Grandpa Kaiser would take our laundry home, and Grandma would wash it for us, because we knew our well was low. How greatly we appreciated them doing this, and I think they were glad to help out; nevertheless it does make life much simpler when we can do it here.

This is my nugget for today – my HE washing machine. I’m very thankful for it, and thus, I am blessed.

So, I ask,

What does it mean to be blessed?

I think -

It means that in spite of the things in life that don’t go just how we hope they would, we choose to focus on the positive in the situation. When we choose to focus on the positives of life rather than the negatives, when we decide to praise God for the good instead of complain about the bad -

the roses, not the thorns

the cherries, not the pits

the nuggets, not the potholes

the HE washing machine, not the struggling well

etc.

we can say we are

Blessed.

 

That’s what I think.

What do you think?

 

Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ

Ephesians 5:20