Victories Big and Small

I woke up this morning to a weather headache. It was fairly early yet 6 AM on a Saturday so Hubby and Expat Son were still sleeping. I struggled to the cabinet for the Tylenol took a couple (small victory) and headed downstairs to make a cup of tea, and check the google reader to catch up on the blogs that I enjoy reading. I came across one the other day chaplainandrews.com and it has become a blog that I look forward to reading. Some I just like to read, others are favorites that I have to read,  this one is in category have to read for me now. As I was catching up on some older posts, that I had not read before this morning, one of them really hit home for me. It was one that had a link for sermons.

Living here in China we really do not have much in the way of church and what we do have I was not impressed with when we were living here before, I mentioned before in previous posts. I won't bore you with the details now but we do miss church here.  We do try to make a trip in to Hong Kong to go to a real church with real clergy men occassionally one of those will be coming up soon as I will be scheduling medical appointments for the family this month.

The post that struck me was called Living in Victory the post on July 3rd. In the sermon at SermonCentral it talks about victory in our lives. I thought about just this little thing, victories in our lives, because it has come up recently in my life. We all have victories and conflicts in our lives no matter how good or bad our lives seem to us. I noticed though that, the people that should be supportive in our lives, family and friends, many times are not willing to be happy or show happiness for the victories in our lives.  Instead they become jealous and try to lash out by putting you down or trying to make the victory less than it should be, then comes the conflict.  Anger,confusion,defensiveness, and even sadness.
I generally pray for those people but sometimes, it is difficult for me to understand why, someone who has so many victories in their own lives would want to try to take away the victories in someone else's life. Do they feel their lives and victories are so insignificant that they cannot be happy for someone else? 
I have victory in my life I have a loving husband, we have a beautiful daughter who someday may be a Pastor, a wonderful exciting son soon to have his 11th Birthday, we live overseas in a culture different than our own, we have friends from all over the world, all from different walks of life, we have family and friends at home who love us, we have a Saviour that loves us and watches over us always. Those are just a few of the wonderful victories that we have and I am thankful for every single one.
I am happy for others who have victories in their lives, no matter how big or small those might be and I hope they keep having victories in their lives!

Comments

[chaplainandrews]

Thank you for reading!
We do all have our challenges and our victories--many times people don't seem to understand that no matter what is going on the most important challenge or victory to the person who is experiencing it is theirs. We all need to be more compassionate and encouraging.
Thank you for the encouragement today.