It seems easy, but then again, it seems difficult. It seems hard to see the glass as not only full for right now, but for ever. It seems hard to see a bigger picture, a bigger plan, when it's invisible. I like the concrete, the fathomable, the obvious, the strategic, the logical. Trust maybe isn't one of those things, and neither is the future.
This weekend I grasped thankfulness though. I am realizing that joy is not something that is ever handed to you, and even when you seek joy and pursue it alone, you can't always even remotely get a grip on it. However, thankfulness, I am realizing, leads to joy in really beautiful ways. It is in the moments, days, weeks, that we live out of constant awe and thankfulness to God that we experience true joy. Thankfulness cannot exist apart from joy. Joy cannot exist without constant, unceasing thankfulness.
To be thankful is to have joy seeping out of the pores of your body. That kind of joy is the kind that brings others to ask questions about what you have that they don't. To live, breathe, move, and exist with continual thankfulness is to show the Gospel without knowing it.
Thankfulness is a task and a feat to live out daily. But I am realizing the worth and value in it. Seeing God in the little things, in the day to day thankfulness- the thanking of food and friendship and laughter and things falling together without stress and music and intentional conversations and the beauty of the body of Christ- choosing to see God in those little things means choosing to acknowledge that God works in and through everything. Thankfulness is, as clique as it is, an act of worship. An act of reverence to God. That we don't have it all figured out, but He does. And we choose to acknowledge and thank God in that. And if we trust Him effortless, continually, in the little things, we will eventually grow to trust Him in the huge things. We will begin to let go of all that strikes fear, bitterness, negativity, and doubt into our life. We will replace it all with thankfulness.
"I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin. And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin. I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat. The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience."— Shauna NiequistThank Him today.
