30+ Days of Giving Thanks, Day 43: the Conveniences of Modern Life

Some people enjoy camping in rustic settings, without improved campsites, electric hookups, bathhouses with plumbing, toilets, warm showers, etc. They sometimes call it "roughing it." Today, we see this as a novelty, and we sometimes put up with the inconveniences and discomforts for the sake of overcoming "adversity" and "hardship." My parents, my grandparents, and everyone who lived before them called this "roughing it" by another name. They called it "living." 

My mother was a teenager during World War II. She wrote in her diary during the war years about the day that their first telephone ( a "party line") was installed in their house. A generation later, when my siblings and I would go to visit Grandma and Grampy at the house where my Mom grew up, there was still an outhouse in the side yard, about 10 yards from the kitchen door. By that time (in the 60s), their home had "indoor plumbing" but the outhouse was still there, and still worked! In fact, after a two hour car ride in a densely packed family station wagon, with too much milk to drink before we left home, and a too-small juvenile bladder, that outhouse often proved to work perfectly!

As a boy growing up in church, we would get an occasional missionary prayer letter from one of our overseas missionaries. The news contained in the prayer letter might be several weeks old by the time we received it. Sharing information back then was, by today's standards, ridiculously slow.

With these thoughts in mind, I am writing today as a person who is truly thankful for the many conveniences and comforts of modern life that we enjoy and often take for granted. I have not one but two working "flush toilets" in my home (and, ironically, a "working" outhouse in the shed in our back yard!) We have cable-based telephone service and internet access, with more channels in regular and high definition on our televisions than I can even remember. We have fifteen (yes, 15!) different devices in our home that can access the internet, including computers, game consoles, and smart phones. We can communicate around the globe in seconds both in text, speech and even video. I have a device in my car that constantly queries the network of 22 geosynchronous navigation satellites in orbit, and advises me of my exact location on the planet, overlaid on a detailed street map so that I can find my way to just about anyplace in the United States that has an address.

We have two refrigerator/freezers in our home, and both are filled to one degree or another with fresh and frozen food. Additional food is waiting in the pantry cupboard. We have fresh drinkable water that doesn't have to be strained or boiled before drinking it. We have hot and cold running water in what seems an inexhaustible supply. We have a natural gas-fueled furnace that keeps our home at a comfortable temperature, and fans and window air conditioners to help keep the house reasonably cool in the oppressive heat of summer. We have an electric stove/oven to prepare food, and a microwave oven besides. An automatic dishwasher stands ready to simplify after-dinner cleanup. A washer and dryer have replaced the need to take the clothes down to the stream and beat the dirt out of them with rocks in the running water.

If we don't feel like cooking, we can use our telephone and order food to be prepared for us and delivered to our door. We can even read our bank card numbers over the phone when ordering and we don't even have to be bothered handling money to pay for the food.

I could go on for many more paragraphs about various comforts and conveniences that we all enjoy, but I think I've made my point. It's a great time to be alive on Planet Earth! There are a few disadvantages too, but that's not my topic today. Heavenly Father, thank You for the comforts and conveniences that make our lives so much easier today than the lives our parents, and their parents before them, lived. May they not make us soft and weak, but may we ever be thankful for these blessings.