It's all about your perspective

You better have at least 10 spare minutes if you're going to read this blog post, because first gotta read THIS.  It's quite possibly my favorite post from my favorite blogger, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary (lives in Costa Rica).  It doesn't matter that she's my favorite blogger because that's the only blog I ever read, right?  hehe

Now that you've read that litte gem from Jamie (what?! you still haven't?! well go read it!), lemme tell you about my situation.  The other day I had had enough.  Just enough.  I'm not exactly sure what specifically I had enough of, but I'd had enough of whatever it was.  It all came to a head when I realized that absolutley ZERO of the bajillion allergy medications I've tried over the past few weeks worked.  I live in Mexico; I don't GET allergies anymore.  Until those little cotton nightmares started floating out of the trees by the Willamette River.  I knew I was in trouble when JP said one day, "What is all that?  It looks like snow."  Yep, piles of the cotton thingies.  AND the signal that my allergies are going to flare up at any given moment.  AND, I'd never lived in Oregon since pseudofedrine became a prescription drug.  I just knew all this was going to make for a miserable time. 

JP and I have been living "out in the country" at a great little cabin that was made specifically for missionaries to use while in the States.  Cool, huh!  It's a bit far out of town (with gas prices at over $4 a gallon, it seems like it's on the moon!), but it's a great place.  I was starting to get irritated at the distance we had to drive to reach civilization.  Now, I grew up in Salem, but was done with small towns the moment I set eyes on Queretaro, population 1.5 million.  I always thought that if we ever move back to the States permanently, we'd live in Seattle.  It just sounds cool.  It's big, and very Northwesty.  Although I may develop seasonal depression after about 3 days in constant rain...  Anyhow, I SWORE that I would NEVER live in a small town.  Salem is the absolute smallest I could handle.  So I may have been moping around feeling sorry for myself because we live so far outside of the city.

That's when the allergies came on full steam.  I cried.  (yeah, that just made my snotty, sneazy mess even messier)  I hated being "out in the country" where I have to drive a LONG time (like TEN minutes! gasp!) to even get to a pharmacy. 

Then, JP looked out the window and said, "We are SO blessed to actually get to live out here."  What?!  What are you talking about?!  Don't you see?!  My ALLERGIES are KILLING ME!  And YOU aren't the one who has to DRIVE all the time to get us places!  (Drivers' license situation to be fixed soon!)  And he was just so happy, so content to be living where we are living.  Because we get to see Mt. Hood from our house.  Because we have cherry orchards that change colors all the time right outside our window.  Because we can hear frogs outside at night instead of neighbors' disco-club-music.  Because God gave us an almost free place to live where it's just the two of us living in one house. 

So I felt like a moron.  We ARE "SO blessed to actually get to live out here!"  JP had the perspecive on the whole situation that I needed.  God TOTALLY provided everything we needed for our time in the States.  We really couldn't ask for a better place to live.  And I was complaining about it all. 

Well, God's given me a break over the past two days from my allergies, so that's helped my attitude a lot.  But I've also realized that I can't always be the pessimist.  I need to see the GOOD in our situation instead of the BAD.  And there's like a million times more good things in our living situation than there are bad things anyway, so that shouldn't be too hard!  God's good at getting my attention and making changes for the better in my life!