Gratitude for So Much Luck

I have just spent the last 90 minutes prepping food for my work day lunches and reorganizing my refrigerator and pantry. I am tired and it's past my bedtime, but I am so grateful that I can do this. To have all this food and this space in which to prepare it -- it's so much more than so many have. I am so grateful.

We have just experienced torrential rains for the last 5 days. Thousands of people within a 50 mile radius have lost their homes to flood waters. They may be sleeping on cots or a damp floor in a shelter with a stale sandwich to eat for breakfast tomorrow. And that's nothing compared with the desperate, interminable poverty experienced by millions around the globe.

Yet here I stand in my comfortable kitchen, typing away on a $400 phone. My biggest problem is that I need to get upstairs to my bed. I need to go to bed so I can get up for my job and then go to school tomorrow evening. I have a job and I have a secondary education at my fingertips.

This is so much luck. 

Heavy

That's how I feel.  So much pain and fear and senselessness in the world.  It's piling up.  So, so heavy.

Death in my family.  Sudden, accidental death of a friend of a friend before that.  A mad gunman murdering movie goers. A child at work diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Another brought to us, seizing, not breathing, whisked away in an ambulance after we do what we can.  A 10-year-old girl abducted, her non-intact body found in an open field 5 days later.  A close friend's son hit by a truck and dragged down the street.

Life is so fleeting. It can be destroyed without reason, without warning, without regard for anything or anyone.

I am terrified to let the kids loose in the neighborhood.  A quick glance the wrong way at the wrong time and they're flattened by a car.  A creep follows them to the playground.  Or follows them home.  They disappear into any one of a million cars never to be seen or heard from again.

I do so much to protect them, to do the best for them.  In a hundred ways, every minute of every day, I think about what would be best for them and how to do it.  How to keep them safe, give them the best that I can.  And it may not be enough.  What if it's not enough?

Even if none of those accidents happen, even if none of those premeditated horrors befall them, even if none of that happens, what if?  What if there's a silent, genetic predisposition lurking some where in their bodies?  What if I take them to the doctor for a headache that isn't just a headache?  What if ...

I try valiantly not to let them see this.  I encourage them to go out and play.  I call them when they get off the bus to hear them get home.  I hug them tightly, so tightly, every morning and every night and every chance I have in between.  I smile at them and laugh with them and tickle them.  I caution them about creeps and about anyone who gives them a funny feeling.  I teach them the rule of the road -- that everything is bigger than you and everything else wins, no matter what the crosswalk or the sidewalk say.

I do all this and I hope against hope that it's enough.  I do all this because the "what ifs?" lurking in the recesses of my mind, or plaguing the forefront of my mind, can't take over.  Life goes on because it must.  Being petrified on account of the heaviness is not an option.

This Makes My Stomach Flip