30 Days of Gratitude Launch

I love when other people dedicate their FaceBook or Instagram posts to gratitude the month of November. I want in. So here goes.

Day 1: I am grateful for clean drinking water.

 I lived in Argentina for 14 months, and during my time there, I had to purchase filtered water. Water from the tap was not purified and often had bacteria. We could use it for bathing and cooking, but not for drinking. The other missionaries and I, we'd call up Javier, the water guy, who would drop by our apartment twice a month with a truckbed filled with plump blue containers. We'd purchase three large jugs of purified water from him for no small sum, heave them upside down (with no small effort) and land them on a special stand we left on our kitchen counter. During the summer months, when 100*F weather and 100% humidity afflicted us, our pocketbooks were drained all the more quickly from further water purchases in order to maintain some semblance of hydration. 

I remember returning to the states and the gift of lifting my glass to the tap and knowing that the water that came out of it was CLEAN. I remember feeling sudden peace when I showered, not fearing that I might have accidentally swallowed a microscopic bug or gotten one into my eyes. I remember feeling joy, then guilt, then happiness, then calm, then... well, then I didn't think about it anymore because clean water was the norm.

But it's not the norm, not for most of the world. And I don't want to get complacent again. I'm grateful, I'm grateful, I'm grateful for clean clean clean clean clean clean clean abundant water.