Broken Blessings

This is the view out my kitchen window where I sit to do my quiet time every morning.  It is the gate to the steps off my deck.  I see this every morning as I stare out my window, yet somehow I never really saw it until this morning

What you can't see in this picture is the huge gaping hole in the floor of the deck where one of the 2x4s has completely rotted through.  That is what usually catches my attention, it's really quite large, I could probably lose a small child down it!  But until this morning the gate had somehow escaped my attention.  I cringed a little bit when I saw it, thinking to myself, "great something else we have to fix, we probably just need to replace the whole deck.  I wonder how much that will be!  We are never going to reach that savings number at this rate..."

And then I stopped, I just stopped.  And I looked around my house, really looked (past the mess, the pile of laundry and dirty floors).  And I immediately recognized how very VERY blessed we are.  Yes there are things that are broken and ugly and messy but there is so much more that is beautiful.  And I, we, are truly, truly blessed.  

The thing that really struck me as I sat looking at the broken gate was that it didn't just break this morning.  My guess is that it broke awhile ago and I simply didn't notice it.  I was so busy looking at the gaping hole in the floor I didn't notice the gate falling apart.  That happens in other areas of my life too.  I get so focused on this one imperfection, this one thing that needs fixing, this one thing that's missing, like a big hole right in the middle of my life, that I stop paying attention to the other things around me.   I stop paying attention to the beauty that surrounds me in all other places and I stop paying attention to the little things that are quickly falling apart while I'm not paying attention.  

Things like my ability to be patient, my capacity to love, having a thankful heart, these things start falling apart when I focus on the broken things in my life.  All of the sudden my blessings, which are great, seem so spread apart.  Perhaps I need to look at the broken things in my life in a new light.  Perhaps I need to stop seeing them as broken, and start seeing them as the blessing that they are.  They are a reminder that my house, my life, my very self is not perfect, it can be pretty broken at times, but God loves me anyway and he has blessed me abundantly anyway.   Even though I am broken, just like my gate.

I don't think I am going to add the gate to the "honey-do" list, at least not yet.  I kind of like it just the way it is, a broken blessing.