I love Amazon. Go online, pick what you want to buy, purchase it, and it will show up on your doorstep in a couple of days. How simple is that? These days you don’t even have to leave your own home to shop. You can do all that sitting on your couch.
Compared with time’s past, we have so much. Life is so much easier today than it was, say, 500 years ago. What we have today at the tips of our fingers, people who lived before us had to suffer and die to enjoy. Take spices, for example—garlic, paprika, cinnamon, curry, dill, etc.
Kathryn ordered some spices from Amazon recently. For some reason, I read the back label. And this is what it said:
Don’t ever forget, hundreds of years ago, a life without spice was so incredibly difficult that people sailed around the world looking for it. And these weren’t luxury cruises. These were harsh, risk-your-life, fall-off-the-edge-of-the-earth voyages. Yet they still did it. All because they believe that you should never live a life without spice.
Here I am holding in my hands a bag of spice that someone in the past would have travelled around the world to get. Kathryn picked up her iPhone, ordered it, and someone brought it to us. People of the past risked their lives for what I have delivered to my door. Wow!
So much of what we have today—spices, printers, the internet, sugar, antibiotics, planes, MRIs, indoor plumbing, running water, A/C and heat, modern farming equipment—are recent inventions. Life is so much better with these modern inventions. I would never want to live in a time where I must travel the world to get sugar. I love cookies too much.
We need to remember the blessings that God gives to us in the here and now. Yes, our world is crazy, but I (and I imagine you as well) prefer living in the 21st century. So many of these blessings our ancestors did not have. When you are tempted to complain, reflect on what you have. Be thankful. Be content. Don’t complain. We have so much. Praise God for the abundant blessings He has given us.
Pastor Chance
