DAILY WRITING

Day 2

We all have trouble doing it: thanking God.

As soon as something that looks hard comes along, we ask God for help, day after day, and wonder sometimes why nothing seems to get better. But when something good happens to us, we might thank God once or twice, and then move on in our lives, thinking that everything is going wrong.

There is a quote by Thomas Fuller that goes ‘Sickness is felt, but health not at all’. It’s so true, though. We feel a cold, a knot in our neck, we feel a sore ankle, a bleeding finger … but when we’re healthy and feeling well, we don’t feel it. We don’t take extra attention to it. We just kind of know it but don’t really think about it.

It’s the same with life, which I think is what Thomas Fuller was getting at. We feel it when someone breaks our hearts, when we get stressed, when people gossip about us … but we don’t really feel it when all our family members are well, or we have a roof over our heads, or that we actually have a temptation called chocolate.

To break out of this habit, or at least to start to thank God each day, I’m going to look for one beautiful thing (of God’s creation) every day from now on. Yesterday it was a black and white bird, perhaps a magpie, sitting on the powerlines outside my bedroom window. The sky was in the background, and it just looked so pretty, sitting there while pruning its feathers.

Today it’s the bright blue sky, with its white, fluffy clouds. It looks so bright and stunning; I don’t know how anyone could dismiss it as something to take for granted. It’s beautiful, just like all of God’s creation.

The story of Adam and Eve (in the beginning of Genesis) is a perfect example of God’s wonderful creation. Go on, look it up. You won’t be sorry.