Rich: Be thankful for the good times and the bad

Daddy always believed the good Lord should be thanked for the hard times as much as he was praised for the good times.

Every Thanksgiving meal, as well as our regular Sunday dinners, was blessed by the patriarch of our family with a prayer that included Daddy's humble voice saying, "Lord, thank you for the trials and tribulations of this old life, knowing that those trying times draw us nearer to thy almighty hand."

Drove me crazy. I saw no logical reason to be grateful for the challenges because as I saw it, if you bragged too much on God for sending those tribulations, he most likely would be encouraged to send more. It didn't seem like a very smart idea to me.

Now, I am wiser.

It has been one of the three hardest years of my life, perhaps the hardest because it was a steady flow of tribulations. In the other two years, the troubles came in one big clump. It began in January when a water line broke in the ceiling of my childhood home and destroyed the house. As the insurance agent said, "If this were a car, we'd total loss it." It took six months to reconstruct it, and if you have ever dealt with construction, you know how that will try a person's faith.

Still, the insurance company and the contractor rose up beautifully and generously to the task. In the midst of a challenge, there were blessings to be found.

I won't list all the troubles here, for there isn't room, and neither do you have the time to read them all. But, among other things, one of my houses was broken into and beloved family mementos taken. It nearly killed me to lose those pieces of Mama and Daddy, particularly a couple of items Daddy had cleverly crafted himself. Two months later, another attempted crime drove me to becoming a modern day Annie Oakley and led the sheriff's depar