Gifts Forgotten

On Friday night, I went to my local card shop to play Magic: the Gathering, and my decks did pretty well. One of them was a Standard White/Black/Red Allies deck that I threw together literally only a few seconds before my first game with it. The other one was a Mono-White Commander deck that I had been working on for weeks. Every so often, I look for good cards I could get to improve my Commander deck. Recently, I discovered a few great cards for the deck - among the cards I already owned.

One of those cards is Celestial Mantle, a card that increases the power (and toughness) of a creature and has the potential to double that creature's controller's life total. If you enchant your own creature with Celestial Mantle, you could possibly double your life total with it. It's an incredibly powerful card, and I even put it on my wishlist, but I took it off the list when I discovered that I still had a copy of the card. I thought I had traded it away.

Another few cards I was thrilled to find were Riot Control, Crusader of Odric, and Sphere of Safety. Sphere of Safety and Riot Control are cards a player can use to protect themselves from other players' creatures, and Crusader of Odric is a creature that can be fairly powerful under certain circumstances. I was tempted to buy Sphere of Safety because its effect was that good, but I noticed that its art looked familiar. Years ago, my brother gave me those cards, and a few others, when he returned from his mission in South Korea, but since all of those cards were printed in Korean, I had little idea what they were. I had planned to look them up eventually and build a deck around them, but now I know that they would fit perfectly in, and greatly improve, a deck I already have.

I wonder how often that's the case in real life. We have many blessings, including gifts, talents, and opportunities. I wonder how many of those blessings go unused because we forget we have them or failed to recognise them when we received them. This especially makes me think of the Priesthood, the "Celestial Mantle" that can bring great blessings down on our heads or those of our loved ones, but only if we remember to request or offer them. It also makes me think of all the other blessings God is willing to grant us, but has made contingent on our asking for them through prayer.

Let's not let these blessings go to waste any longer. Let's try to make note of them, so we can remember them and make use of them when we need them most. I definitely plan on adding these four cards to my Commander deck (with printed reminder sheets for what the Korean cards say in English). I should also look for, and make use of, the other blessings I've been given and have forgotten that I have.