The blessing of little or much
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- September 6, 2020
- 874
The other morning I sat down on my porch as the sun was slipping upward softly into the dusky sky. The worn cushions wrapped me closer, bringing me a comfortable place to ponder the week ahead.
There’s no other place to consider the coming minutes of my life quite like my front porch: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday all blurring together in a vicious swirl of what needs done. I call it vicious because it comes at you and either you’re ready to dance with it or you get swept under by it. I thought about the words I wanted to type and other things that need completed.
Contained in the shifting days also will be the mountain of eggs I’ll scramble, salted and peppered, served along with buttery toast. Maybe I’ll wipe a toilet bowl and make sure we don’t run out of clean underwear, knowing my working washer and dryer will do the job it’s meant for. The moments of my life spin continually, and I think on them carefully as the phrase “blessed” comes to my mind.
Call it centering, praying or throwing up a lifeline to the heavens, these silent moments speak life into me, pulling the frayed edges together so I don’t unravel completely. I used to consider these pockets of time tiny, wrapped gifts from God that were meant just for me: a deliciously vibrant, blooming flower or maybe words someone speaks that are a balm to a ragged soul. I don’t believe they are random and smile inwardly, knowing they were put there just for me to find. I don’t consider myself blessed to receive them.
Has that word reached the ultimate zenith of its meaning?
I think of my mother-in-law who makes her home in the dusty hills surrounding Mexico City. She gets up to make coffee in a house that looks nothing like mine. Her water is poured into a tin container and set to boil. Pouring the hot water into a cup, she stirs a teaspoon of dried coffee granules into it along with a hefty portion of cane sugar. She takes a sip and smiles. Her surroundings are nothing like mine. There are no soft cushions to hold her and ease the bones that have taken her into her 70s.
She braids her long hair, only now showing strands of gray. Laundry by hand, hot water for washing dishes that must be boiled. She might make a trip several streets over to buy a half-dozen eggs and maybe a kilo of tortillas. She considers herself to be blessed with life in this life.
In my comfortably cushioned chair, I challenge myself to understand what blessing means. Is it a job that fills up our day, food in the refrigerator to eat and the ease of a soft cushion for your tired bones at night? Would the same things feel like a blessing if we said less about what we’ve been given?
As I gathered myself up and looked around the porch, I realized I could find this anywhere. My mother-in-law finds it and complains far less than lots of us do. We throw things away that we think are done being useful and utter with the same lips how blessed we are to buy newer, fancier things.
Are we blessed to live in this country because of what’s available to us, or are people in other countries not blessed because of what they don’t have access to? I can’t count the times people have told one of my loved ones how lucky they are to live here. I question this. If we can’t say that others are blessed with what they have because it seems less, then maybe we’re the ones missing the real blessing.
Melissa Kay Herrera is a columnist and author. You can find her published novel on Amazon at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives, The Gospel Book Store in Berlin, Bookworms and Faith View Bookstore. For queries or speaking engagements, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.