When my grandsons were young, we flew out to Tennessee to visit them for Easter. We had a limited amount of time with the kids, so it seemed that we were ‘multi-tasking’ the entire weekend. We wanted to color some Easter eggs, play outside, go for a bike ride, and just spend time together. I filled up all my daughter’s pots with water and a couple dozen eggs and put them on the stove to boil, then headed out to join everyone playing baseball in the front yard. When I got out there, we set up and game, and played until everyone got up to bat at least three times. We were having so much fun that we lost all track of time. Suddenly I realized there was a weird odor coming from the house. I ran in to the smoke-filled kitchen coughing and choking my way over to the stove to turn the fire off. There was no longer any water in any of the pots, and the eggs that were sitting in the bottom of the pots were cracked, black, and for some reason smelled like burnt rotten eggs. Devastated that I had ruined at least half of the eggs, I asked my husband to run to town and pick us up another couple dozen eggs for us to boil and eventually color with the boys while I scrubbed the black from all three pots. In the long run, although the house stunk for the next few days as a reminder that I had forgotten the eggs on the stove, the boys came out ahead… as they had more eggs to color then we had originally planned.
It’s funny, when we look back on that day, the first thing that comes to mind is not the nasty smell in the house, but AAAALLLLLLLLL the Easter eggs that we colored, and the fact that we had so many eggs that we could not hide all of them. In fact, we ended up hiding many of the eggs in plain sight.
How many times do we look at the negative in any situation, and we miss the blessing. That year we could have been frustrated about me burning so many of the eggs and not being able to color as many eggs. Instead we ended up with so many eggs we literally could not hide them all. We found the blessing during the ‘Stinky egg’ fiasco. We need to concentrate on the positive, and the praiseworthy.
“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things.” Philippians 4:8
