First World Problems

      This post has been on my heart for a while.  Months ago I saw a Twitter post to Facebook that was mentioning some small annoyance with the hashtag of #firstworldproblem.  I should just put it out there that I am basically Twitter illiterate and scared of ever using it, but I have sort of figured out those little hashtags since they get posted to Facebook and talked about on NPR.  I am a major nerd.  Anyway, I wish I had taken note of who had written this, because it really stuck with me.
      John and I have used this one liner as a running joke in our house to keep things in perspective.  I started using it when we were working on getting a play kitchen for the girls.  It started with this stove.



      John found it on deep discount clearance at Sears after Christmas and brought it home, since I had mentioned wanting to get a play kitchen for the girls at some point.  At $12.50 - it was a great deal.  However, we immediately realized that there were other pieces that matched it, and we wanted them all. We have a thing with complete sets and matching, and once something is on John's mental list, he wants to check it off.  So we started scouring the internet for the matching pieces, but came up woefully short.
      Months later, a friend was at K-Mart and found the sink.  John got it within the hour, and when we headed to Wichita for my Mom's wedding, he called the K-Marts there and found the refrigerator.  Play kitchen trifecta complete.



As we were driving to get the last piece, I said, "You know, it really is a first world problem to worry about getting a play refrigerator."  And we laughed.  Because the reality is that we do live in the first world, and I do not think it is bad to have a play kitchen.  (In fact, I am actually working on making the whole area really cute.)  But there are some hard realities in our world, and I often need to gain a little perspective about what my problems are.
      As we watched CNN the other night, I heard the statistic that 30,000 children have died in the last 30 days in the horn of Africa due to extreme drought and famine there.  That is staggering.  Children like Lily and Bella who were not born into the first world, which is not their fault.  I used to just think that we could simply share out of our excess, but now I know that it is so much more complicated than that.  There are corrupt governments and people that exacerbate the issues and make it harder than it should be to help those in need.  And the needs are so great.
      Yesterday was a hard mommy day.  Bella was really fussy from getting a mouthful of teeth, and Lily spent most of the day defying every single simple instruction that I gave to her.  Which is exhausting.  I was bogged down in the need to do things like grocery shop, launder clothes and clean, and I was complaining about meal planning.  Those are all first world problems.  Most of the world wishes those were the problems that they had.
      I want to keep perspective and teach perspective.  We have so much - far more than we need and sometimes, more than is even good for us.  We have fake food to go into a fake kitchen, which seems so unfair in a world where people starve to death everyday.  Where children starve to death.  I pray that the Lord shows us our responsibility in this world to care for those around us and gives us the strength to do what He calls us to.  I don't want to be so caught up in my first world problems that I lose sight of what suffering really is, and I want to use all that we have been given to be a blessing.  In whatever ways we can be.

*Edited:  I found out that this phrase probably came from this YouTube Video that John and I watched a couple of times last night and laughed a lot - so funny!  Thanks for the tip-off, Carly!