A Second for Thanks
Nov 25, 03:35 PM
The quote of the day on a white board at the gym where I work out struck me: There are 86,400 seconds in the day, it said. Can you spare one to say "thank you?"
A bit on the polemical side, even preachy.
Still, it caught my attention. Sometimes we substitute urgency for reverence. Well, I do, anyway. We may prefer to make things happen over waiting gratefully for God’s purposes to unfold. We get stingy with our seconds. We’re busy enough that sometimes we have to practice taking pauses for gratitude.
And we live in times, pastor Donald Shelby likes to say, that are more characterized by "Blah" than "Ah!" I would add that we don’t do well when it comes to awe, either.
But I also believe a capacity for noticing and being amazed again can be expanded. I like what Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
Seeing it might only take a second.
As adults, our capacity for noticing things is diminished; we think we have seen it all and done it all. We need to become again like a child with an “awe” about everything we see, feel and hear…as a common bush is afire with God, we need to smell the smoke. Our desire to see the world through the eyes of a Child again will serve us well when we finally experience heaven.
— Agatha · Nov 28, 08:25 PM · #