When Matt and I were first married, we had a bed. It was a good bed, and served us well, but it got progressively lumpier and harder as the years went on. It got harder and harder on Matt’s back, and so we saved for a new bed. After a long time, we had enough, and a little while ago, we bought the new mattress. (No this isn’t it in the picture…this is a picture of me years ago during our 5th anniversary, in another comfy bed.)

The new bed was amazing. Once I climbed in, I never wanted to leave it. I felt safe, warm, and enveloped in its cloud-like softness. My pregnant aches and pains melted into the soft, downy cover. Matt’s back started to feel better.

Bliss. :)

But after a little while, I noticed something. It got harder and harder for me in the morning to leave its comforting warmth and climb out of the bed to kneel down in the cold to pray. Then, it became harder for me to remain out of the bed long enough at night to kneel next to it and pray. Prayers went from being kneeling-by-the-bed prayers to being nestled-under-the-covers prayers. And somehow, those just never end up quite as sincere for me.

This marvelous bed had become somewhat of a drain on my spirituality.

As I laid there one recent morning, after a difficult spell of sickness and literally living in that bed, I listened to the sounds of my home in the morning, and again fought with the temptation to just pray in bed. I heard my daughters giggling downstairs, my sweet husband humming cheerfully in the shower. I felt the ever stronger movements of my newest daughter inside me, and felt the warm blankets around me.

Suddenly, tears filled my eyes as I realized, once again, that everything I had, from the beautiful home we are living in to my returning health to my glorious family to my new BED, had all come from a loving Father. I would never have these things without Him. I have lived enough to know that nothing I have, nothing, comes from me. And yet, here I was, struggling to even put forth enough effort to emerge from the covers and thank Him.

It made me think. Perhaps there are comforts, luxuries that we sometimes have, that can cause us to feel a little too at ease, if we let them. It becomes harder to remember, for some reason, just how blessed we are, when we allow ourselves to become too comfortable about anything. Our health, our job, our ease.

No, I’m not throwing my bed away.

But I am refocusing my attention and my gratitude. Perhaps now, instead of crawling into a soft bed every night and thinking, “Wow, this is the life,” I will think, instead, “Thank Thee. For everything.”