Thinking Out Loud, Volume CDXLVII

Just to be clear, I can't condone what the guy did, because there's never a right time to do the wrong thing.  All I'm saying is I think I understand why he did it.  He was a nice looking young man, a hard worker, a good provider for his family, and he loved spending good quality time with his kids.  One would think any woman would be thrilled to have such a man, but for some reason, his wife just never seemed to be quite satisfied.  Everyone who worked with her in her office had to listen to her daily complaints about her husband.  No, he didn't forget birthdays or anniversaries; she made sure of that.  It's just that the gifts he bought for those occasions never pleased her.  Besides that, he loved to play golf on Saturday mornings.  He was too conservative with their finances.  He liked to go over to his parents' house and check on them at least once a week, and that infuriated her.  Her co-workers heard every detail about it all, until the morning she showed up for work with red, puffy eyes, caused by a night of crying.  He had found someone else and had left her.  Everyone in the office was shocked by her tears, because they thought by the way she was constantly running him down, she would be glad to get rid if him. On a slightly different note, there have been times, especially during some of the more high-stress periods of my career, I've looked with envy at the man hanging on the back of the garbage truck,  mainly because all he had to do every day was go to work and then forget about it when he got off in the afternoons.  Then one day the thought occurred to me that I've never actually envied him on payday.  As a matter of fact, that man would probably trade jobs with me in a heartbeat. Sometimes the restaurant doesn't get our steak exactly the way we like it, and we let them know about it, while there are so many who can't afford to eat there...possibly even some of the employees of the same restaurant.   When we have to work a full day on that last day of work before the long holiday weekend, it puts us in a bad mood because it's so late by the time we can head out of town for a weekend on the lake, yet how many are having to work through the entire weekend?  If my bonus is a little less this year than what I was hoping for, it makes me mad.   At one point in my career, I was a sales rep for a tie company, and they would send me whole ties to show as samples.  At the end of the season, I would have all those ties that were no longer being made, so I would give a few of them to one of my good customers to for his personal use.  Then came the day when the company stopped sending whole ties; instead they sent fabric swatches cut out in the shape of ties.  As a result, I no longer had the ties to give to my customer.  During that transition, I only had one client stop buying my product.....the one I had given the ties to.  The one customer who got mad and left me was the one I had treated best.   Why do we complain about our blessings?  Have you ever gone out of your way to provide something special for your kids and they weren't satisfied with it?  How did it make you feel?  I'm convinced God must feel the same way about us sometimes when He blesses us so abundantly, yet we complain. Has He blessed us so many times that we've come to expect it, and even believe He owes it to us?  I'm reminded of a lesson by my friend, Roy Duffey, about how, if we're not careful, the more we're given, the less grateful we become.  As abundantly as I've been blessed, the last thing I should ever do is complain about those blessings. Preston