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Derrick

Taken for granted.

Most everyone is familiar with these words, and at the same time they are rarely acknowledged. But everyone is guilty of taking something for granted– In other words, we are guilty of forgetting our luck.

The commonly accepted belief is that you have to win tickets or chips in a casino or arcade in order to be a winner. What most people don’t realize is that they already won the jackpot prize, a long time ago.

What is it? The jackpot prize would be how incredibly blessed we are. Everyday necessities that we take for granted would be a shimmering pot of gold to the majority of the world who are less fortunate.

Don’t believe you’re blessed? Here’s a straight-up statistic: If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, then you are richer than 75% of the world who aren’t as lucky. We are more blessed than we can imagine.

My family has recognized our blessings, and we’ve done as much as we can to share them. We currently sponsor a boy from Uganda, sending him money every month so that he can go to school.

So that he can go to school. So that he can get an education. So many of us hate school, and we dread it, but we don’t take into account how incredibly lucky we are to get an education. Some would kill to be in our positions, and here we are taking it for granted.

Our boy’s name is Derrick, and every once in a while we will receive a short message to him via airmail. We get to see how he is doing, and he thanks us for helping him be able to go to school. Obviously, he has a translator fill it out for him, but we get to read about what kind of things he likes to do. Just this past week, we received a letter from him.

There was a lot of cute things on there like where he draws us a picture, or tells us his favorite color or activity. However, the thing on there that stuck out to me the most was what he’d said for “question for sponsor”, or what he wanted us to answer for him:

“Do you draw water?”

He had said that his favorite chore was drawing water. He wanted to know if we drew water, too.

I don’t know about you, but this question made me feel incredibly selfish. No, we don’t draw water. We don’t have to walk miles down to a river and carry back heavy gallons of water. What do we have to do? We have to walk three feet and turn on a facet.

My brother and I have volunteered for Matthew 25 ministries, and we’ve heard stories about American families who have adopted a child from a third world country. There was one girl who started crying and freaking out when she saw the shower turned on, because she had never seen such an abundance of clean water and was scared to death that it was being wasted.

Really makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? I remember hearing about an adopted boy, also from a third world country, who would sleep in front of the refrigerator every night because he’d never had a consistent and full food source like that. He was afraid that the food was going to be stolen from him, because he’d never had so much at one time before. He tried to protect it, scared it would disappear the next morning.

We are so blessed that it almost makes me sick. I definitely feel beyond selfish. I have a closet full of clothes while some are forced to wear rags day after day. I have a heated home while some are shivering in the cold or the rain. I have food in my pantry for whenever I want a snack, while some are starving.

The statistics are definitely sickening, but they aren’t set in stone. I can’t feed all the starving, educate all those who aren’t, or clothe an entire country. I will not make an impact on the entire suffering population, but that’s okay. Right now, I am making a difference to one. That’s one boy who will get an education and will be successful. Just because we individually can’t change the world, doesn’t mean we can’t change one perspective of it– It doesn’t mean we can’t change one person.

We take so many things for granted. There are so many blessings that we just ignore, and we have absolutely no right to complain. We must remember that we are the jackpot winners, and it’s time that we started sharing that with the rest of the world.

Did you know that just reading this post proves you are more fortunate than the 3 billion people in the world who cannot read at all?

It’s time to change that 3 billion into 2,999,999,999. And the countdown will begin.


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