Taking For Granted...

   Many times over the past couple of years, I have been asked the reason why Georgia has so many counties, particularly why there are so many smaller ones, when efficiency would call for some consolidation. The reason, as I understand it, was that the State government wanted each person in a county to be no farther from the county seat than he could travel to it and get back home in one day, in a horse and wagon conveyance.

   It is easy for me to forget this as I travel around, using good roads, moving in my car at legal speeds of 55 or 65 or 70 miles per hour, where I can move all the way to the western border of the state and back in that same single day time period.

   I thought of that yesterday when I left the house at 6:30AM, went over the causeway to get the car worked on, went to the drugstore to get a prescription, to the store to get some supplies, to another store for an article I needed, and even to the grocery store for some food items, and still get home by 9:00. Two and a half hours to run all those errands and still have a whole day left for my leisure.

   How much do I take for granted, from the speed that I can travel, to the places I can go, to the opportunities I have to shop, to the good roads. My life is filled with so many conveniences that they do not even register on my radar.

   As hard as it might be for me to sit here in 2014 and imagine how life was back a hundred or so years ago when the last counties were formed in Georgia, how much harder, in fact even impossible for folks back then to imagine my life today.

   I see those towns with the courthouse sitting there on the square, surrounded by stores and homes, thinking all the while how quaint it all is, how picturesque, how idyllic it seems. Those earlier peoples got to live that way, how lucky for them, I think.

   What if those folks could look forward to my life? What would they say? How fortunate we are to live with all the stuff that we have, with the conveniences of modern travel, of fully stocked stores, of instant entertainment?

   All of us can live taking things for granted, not being thankful for what we have, for the life that God has placed in us and the opportunity for living in the day that is ours. We can look back and see what might be missing from our lives today, or we can look forward and think how much better things could be if we lived then, however both can be traps.

   Today is my day. Let me live it as I should. Let me honor God with the hours that might be mine today.

   Do I really want to shop here?

   Or sit in here with my Sears catalog?