by David L Lewis - who has some experience with that question
Last week my favorite brother-in-law, Bob Wheeler, brought my baby sister Diane for a visit. It is curious how she is getting older and Bob and I are not. Maybe it’s because we don’t see each other often anymore, and miss changes the passage of time inflicts. Fortunately for me we live near Rose-Hulman, where their grandson’s team played “football” on the soccer field. Question: When that kid graduates will I never see her again? Just asking.
As it is with us old folks, we siblings spoke of health and hospitals, children and grandchildren, and of childhood happiness and adventures of which neither Bob nor Kay knew.
As I have admitted in other venues, It is unlikely I would have survived childhood and adolescence without the blessing of having Diane in my life. Maybe that’s why the morning after their visit an old Sunday School song was brought to mind:
Count
your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see
what God hath done;
Count your blessings, name them one by
one;
Count your many blessings, see what God hath done.
Counting ‘Di’ there have been many more blessings in my life than I can count, and certainly more than I realized in the course of life as the sun rose, the sun set, This is my ‘working list” of God’s blessings on my life –
Someone once said the only thing by which a man can be judged is whether he did what he honestly believed God gave him to do. This I have done in my meager attempts to serve Him. Whether successful or failure in this service, the Lord has blessed me and mine.
I have loved and been blessed by my wife Kay since the day we met, never looking to the right hand or the left. After all these years I still wake up and wonder how I’d get though the day, how I would live at all, without her.
We had five children of whom any man could be proud. They not only know their parents love them, they love and accept each other. As I once told a neighbor, I know from experience that if I needed my eldest son he would drop everything and come. The neighbor replied, “I envy you.”
We live in a house which truly has been made our home (mostly by the woman in my life). There is always this-n-that to do I suppose. But, we are safe in “the hallow of His hand” from dangers others face in forest fire, flood, or hurricane.
At this point in our life we have no debt, no expensive vices, no unmet need. Our lives are quiet (okay, boring), but we have each other and having food and raiment are therein content.
In all the journeys and struggles of my life it seems like there has always appeared an “angel unaware”. This, however, is subject for another day.
Last of all, health. Yes, the vicissitudes of life exact their pound of flesh. And, my general health must be listed as on down side of ‘as good as it gets’. However, none of diseases now affect this body such as brought down my father at 50, or my brother at 65. Given two more weeks I’ll make it to 80, still alert enough to write what you just read.
All in all, today I consider myself the most blessed big brother on face of the earth,
theBlessedBigBrother
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