How many teams get to win
championships? And do it year after
year? Offensive Line Coach David Ellis
and I, the senior citizens on the MHS football staff, often reflect that doing
this stuff never gets old. We repeat
this mantra with each trip to the state championship game.
It doesn't even get old practicing
through November, when the weather turns decidedly worse. It never gets old doing what we love to
do. It never gets old practicing on Thanksgiving
morning and having breakfast as a team--if nothing else, it means we've made it
as far as the semifinals.
It never gets old heading to
Cookeville or Murfreesboro or wherever the state championship game happens to
be. And I hope we never take it for
granted.
So the next day, after a long day
of power washing, when the joints were aching and the fatigue was significant,
I found myself in a nice warm shower and the question hit me (and this is where
this whole thing might seem tangential but really isn't), what things do we
take for granted.
Like the warm water coming out of
the shower. It felt great. But what if the hot water heater wasn't
working or the water pressure wouldn't provide but a trickle? The reliability of the water heater is
something that we take for granted. At
my house, we depend on South Blount Utilities to make sure there is adequate
water pressure and the water is clean. But
do we stop to think that there are people whose
job it is to make it so?
Or what about the people around
the world for whom a hot shower is not even an option. I tried to look up how many people in the
world go without warm water but all I got was that a billion people don't have
access to clean water so you can assume that they don't have warm water for
showers either.
What else do we take for granted?
Sometimes it's the little
stuff. We take it for granted that the
alarm clock will go off when it supposed to and we won't miss the important
appointment on our morning schedule. Or it
doesn't go off and we're late for work and that creates a whole bunch of
problems.
But we forget the big stuff
too. We take it for granted that the streets
are safe--that law enforcement is doing their job and that most of us never
encounter criminals or criminal acts.
We take it for granted that the
food we are served in a restaurant is fresh and clean and never think about the
government entity whose job it is to make sure that is so. We never stop to
think about the fact that bridges and cars and appliances are safe. We depend
on others to do that. Our nation's
system of checks and balances (including our judicial system) help provide
those guarantees.
We take our health for granted
until we don't have it. We take it for
granted that we will wake up tomorrow morning to a new day.
My prayer for today: May I never forget my many
blessings and never take for granted those many minor miracles that make life
better and easier. And thank you for the sweet taste of victory.
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