Taking You for Granted

Today's Whatever Wednesday topic is to name something or someone that we take for granted...

I have taken many things for granted. Things I know I should cherish far more than I do. This life God has given me? I often take it for granted. However, if this question had been posed to me just a few weeks before I would have been able to give you a solid, hands down, no questions asked answer. That answer would have been Babe. I take him for granted all the time. In the little moments and in the big ones. I look at the amazing gift God has given me in a husband and I know that I should count my lucky stars that he is mine; that he is the one who comes home to me at night. Yet, I often find myself making him far less of a priority than I should. I know it, but more unfortunately I feel that he knows it. I think in the solid awareness of our relationship, I tend to focus on a lot of the outside things and people around us. I am constantly doing, trying, and putting other things first simply because I rest in the assurance that he is always there. I have been trying to fix this. I have been working on making sure he knows just how treasured he is and how blessed I know that I am to have a husband like him.

It is more important to me now than ever. Because when you rest in the assurance that someone in your life will always be there, you are left blindsided when they are not. I rest in the assurance that Babe will always be there because I know that he will never leave me. At least, not for anything on this earth. However, there are things greater than what is here and sometimes we don't get to decide when people leave us. Right now I can say without a doubt that life in general is the biggest thing I have taken for granted.

My family had known that John Wayne's life ending the way it did was always a possibility. Yet, he was John Wayne. He was larger than life and for some reason he seemed to have many of them. I think we took for granted the fact that he was not invincible. He had always seemed to believe he was. He has always lived on the edge and made decisions as if actions had no consequences, which may have been due to the fact that for him, a lot of the time, they didn't. We didn't know, we weren't prepared for what would be the ultimate one.  How many times had he pushed himself to the edge just to stay on this side? He broke his back and made it through, he walked up to deaths door and knocked (probably more times than we all knew), he asked to be let in. Yet death turned him away because that had not been the plan. I don't know God's plan, I don't know the purpose or the whys.  What I do know is that I took the nows for granted. I took for granted the fact that he would always be around; that he would always be here to fight with, laugh with, cringe at, and to just be my brother. It is in realizing that, that I now realize how much I ultimately take life for granted. I just expect that people will be here. I expect for life to continue as it has (even when I sometimes wish it would change) because that is what it has always done. I realize now the need to cherish it; to cherish the good moments and the tough ones. I know the need to love. I vow to take each day and make sure that the people I so easily take for granted know how much they each mean. I vow to always be thankful for the people God has given me because each of them have shaped me into who I am now. I am grateful for that and I am grateful for the time I have had and for the time I still have to make sure I count my blessings.