Reality Check

Reality slammed me in the face today.  I was talking to my husband and we've both been having a time of it with work and I've been dealing with all the various forms of crisis at home and it's getting to the two of us.  He was sharing his complaints with me about how we shouldn't be having the problems with our eight month old refrigerator that we're having and his three week old car isn't working correctly and has to go in for service and, and, and when I said it could be worse.  I told him that my cousin's wife had died and she was younger than me and they had four children.  Suddenly all the gripes we both had didn't matter.  I don't know my cousin, he's my father's cousin even though he's my age.  I met him as a child when he came up to my grandparents' house with his parents and siblings and I'm sure I probably saw him at other family functions over the years and I saw him again at my wedding but the news this weekend that he lost his wife hit home.  It's so easy to complain when work is hard or things break that you rely on but in reality life is shorter than we realize and we are blessed to have family, blessed to have work, blesssed to have those things that clutter up our lives.  Tonight I'm going to stay up late, watch my children sleep and thank God that he has blessed me so richly.