The Howell Blessings

So many of us go through life not even noticing what we are doing. We don't realize what is going on around us, or the affect we have on others. We just "do" life.  We wake up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch some TV then go to bed, just to wake up and do it all over again the next day. We count the days until the weekend when we can sleep in for one or two days, socialize with friends or catch up on chores or just "chill". Then Monday rolls around again and the routine of the week begins again. But some of us get interrupted right in the middle of our routine. Accidents happen, a loved one passes away, or a job is lost.  It's in those moments that we look up from our numb existence to look around us and wonder what just happened. We often think of these times as being tragic, one we never want to live through again, but if we really think about these times in our lives, these are the times we are really aware of what is going on around us. ...

Christians go to church on Sunday's. Shoot, non-Christians go to church on Sunday's, Saturdays and even Wednesdays.  We pray over our meals, maybe at night before we go to bed, and of course...on Sunday's. We've become "so familiar with God, yet so we are so unaware of Him"*.  We not only have become numbed by our daily rituals of serving Christ, we've become apathetic toward the One who created us and sacrificed for us so that we could live in His presence forever.  We've become so calloused to the sins we've committed that we don't allow ourselves to feel the depth of wrong we've caused.  Yet by God's grace and mercy, He loves us still. My momma always used to say that being a Christian and having a relationship with Christ are two different things.  When we go to church and say our daily grace these are things God leads us to do, but when they become routine, we are "missing out on the most exciting part of being a Christian -...