Thursday, May 25, 2017

The Price We Pay

May 25, 2017

For the past two weeks, Linda has been working feverishly to clean up our Cassadaga house so its ready to put on the market. Our tenant was good at paying his rent on time, but was clueless as to how to care for property. Needless to say, it's been a lot of work. Linda has cleaned, scrubbed, and cleaned some more before tackling the yard work. I scraped and painted the barn, and yesterday picked up and took three truckloads of downed tree branches to the village compost. With all this labor, we wake up each morning to a new ache or pain we hadn't noticed before. If we were cars, these bodies would definitely be considered classic, which means they probably should be treated with a bit more TLC than we've given them recently. 

Everyone wants to see photos of the classic cars of Cuba. There are certainly some nice ones down there, but most are pretty beat up, held together and kept running by sheer ingenuity. Most have long ago been converted to diesel, and the interiors are a hodge-podge of parts and materials. Like them, our sore muscles and joints are the price we pay for living this long. We remind ourselves that there are many who haven't been given that privilege. 


Today we visited my mother who lives nearly two hours from us. By the time we got there, my rear end was numb from my butt to my ankles. My feet tingled and my back was sore. It took a few minutes walking around to get the circulation going again. Linda may be up in the middle of the night with leg cramps, something she has had to endure in recent years. But we're here, and each discomfort is merely that-a discomfort that reminds us of how blessed we are to be alive and (mostly) in our right minds. Psalm 16:6 says, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yes, I have a good heritage." They have, and we have, indeed.

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