Deeper thoughts for your Monday

On Thursday I began the day by cleaning up fallen branches and repairing our fence that had been damaged by a large branch that fell during the ice storm. At around 11:30 AM I had just gotten done taking a nice hot shower, when the lights began to flicker and then went off for good. I thought that they would come back on in a few minutes, or maybe a few hours, but when I called home from work that afternoon to see if the answering machine would pick up, meaning we had power, I realized I thought wrong. As Kelly and I went to sleep that night in our 47 degree house we thought for sure that we would wake up to having our power back on. Sadly we were wrong. Friday when we went to work we thought for sure we would have power when we came home, but each time I would call home from work to check my hope began to slip. Slowly I began to realize what the people of New Orleans were talking about, though on a much, much more trivial scale. People would tell me how they had thought that they were leaving for a couple of days and then would be returning back to life as normal, so they only took a couple of days clothes, but nothing else. Sadly as we all know life did not return to normal in a couple of days. It amazes me how we as humans "think" that we know what is going to happen yet we have no clue, how we think that we know when life will return to normal, but that is not when it happens. Somehow it is in times like these that we realize that even our best plans are merely plans, but God knows the future and it is better than we can have ever imagined. Looking back at the past three days, I at first was mad because I couldn't get things done that I had planned to do, but now I have a renewed thankfulness for even the "small" things like electricity that simply make our life easier. As the saying goes its the tougher times in life that make you appreciate the truly great ones.