"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few."~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh ~
I saw this week's quote and knew that this was a perfect week for me to get started with "in other words."
I did not have a wealthy upbringing in a monetary sense. I remember one summer my father had been laid off. We lived in the country in Southern Pennsylvania. Things were so bad that the gas and electricity had been turned off. We had no electric, running water, heat etc.... It was the summer so we had plenty of food primarily from the garden. The house was an old farmhouse with a well that we could bucket water up from. We read the Bible by oil lamp light at night. Cooked on a woodstove (and later used it for heat) that another family had given us.
At that time as a teenager it seemed like a really bad time in my life. Now I would not trade it for the world. The experience brought my family close together. We had a good pure quality of life that all the money in the world couldn't buy.
We had so little at this time, but having so little brought us so much. This was definately a time in our lives when having less "shells" was having something so much more precious even though it may not have seemed so at the time.
4 comments:
Wow that is awesome. My parents grew up in the depression with so little, and then they had six kids so they taught us to appreciate every little thing we were given. Sharing a Coke with my sisters wasn't the REAL thing, it was a RARE thing, but the three of us youngest girls would share, taking sips one by one. I remember those special times and still cherish the memory.
What a beautiful testimony to the beauty of simple things! Thank you.
What a great testimony! I really enjoyed reading this! Thank you for sharing this with us!
I sort of understand what you went through. Although for different reasons (*cough* Hurricane Katrina *cough*) we went without water and electricity for two weeks. (Some people, almost a year later are still without it....). What amazed me, is the way our family sat around and talked to each other.
I stayed at my mother's house and she lives near two of her brothers, a sister, and her father, as well as their spouses and children. The entire family would come together on my parents front porch and BBQ whatever anyone could save from their freezer....and we would spend hours talking together. No computers or television, or telephone to distract us....just enjoying each others company!
We had been washing laundry in buckets and hanging it out to dry on downed trees...we were washing dishes in rainwater....but we were spending family time together that we hadn't done in YEARS! It really was quite awesome!
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