something you probably never thought to be thankful for....

Holy cow - just when you felt like you had thought of all the reasons you have to be thankful - here's one I heard about today... that kinda came by way of the back door/unexpectedly.  I was working yesterday, plowing through the list of things that have to be prepped every day, to have plenty of fresh salads, fruit bowls and yogurt parfaits to have ready to the sales floor every morning. Trying to get as much ready as possible for Monday at 7 a.m. when the store opened and all the 'outdated' fresh products had to be pulled off the shelves.

Sort of frantically working, knowing that anything that did not get done  by Me, would not get done: the guy who was supposed to be there, prepping fruit, cutting melons, pineapple, strawberries to be ready/'ahead' with bowls of cubed and sliced fruit for today just didn't show up. No one told me why he wasn't there, or what had happened, so I thought: when he found out he was the fruit cutter, he thought of a good reason to not show up. Suddenly taken deathly ill, or car trouble, or family issues that called him out of town - anything to avoid a messy, onerous job.

But when he came in today, and I casually wondered what happened, he told me a story that reminded me to be continually thankful for things that never happened. He lives with a girl friend, who has a sixteen year old son, with an apparent chronic lack of impulse control. The sixteen year old kid took his car, without permission, and without a driver's license. Drove to Harris County to pick up a girl friend and went joy riding. Wrecked the car. They saw it leave the apartment parking lot, and assumed it had been stolen, since the mom checked and found the teenager asleep in bed (which was a ploy, so could be considered an outright lie - pillows under the blankets made to look like a person). So they called to make a police report. Then hours later, discovered the teenager not at home, and had to back off from a stolen vehicle report.

The teenager would not answer his phone, until he wrecked the car and needed help. So they were all up all night. Which explains why the fruit cutter was not at work, after about thirty hours without sleep.

I am so, so, so thankful for healthy happy adult children, who (to the best of my knowledge???) did not stray. I am thankful for their common sense, impulse control, capable self-managment and just general, all-around adult hood. I forget to be thankful that they have turned into fully functioning adults, until something like this comes along to remind me that we are blessedly past the hormonal years and they are independent and mostly normal, mature, civilized adults. Thank you, God that we all survived the teenaged years, without anyone getting strangled. Or blood and missing body parts.

If there is anything you would like to confess, I think I am ready now...