Nearly every day and sometimes several times I recite the phrase: “This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” (It comes from psalm 118, verse 24.) I can’t help it–it’s just sort of there, all the time, every day, a regular part of my life. Rarely in these 500+ days that I’ve written this blog have I spoken directly about the Bible or religion. I’ve written quite a bit about spirituality and talk frequently about God, primarily in a broad sense. But having spent my early life in church and immersed myself for a decade of my young adult life in a fundamentalist Christian church, traces of that past life linger. I actually believe the best parts of those days remain with me and have been integrated into my larger spiritual life.
The impact of this is that there is not a single day that goes by when I don’t say the words “Thank you, God” at least once. Gratitude has been part of my life for all of my life; though it’s only in the last eighteen months that I have been intentional in writing and speaking about it on a regular basis. My belief in a power higher than myself and my thankfulness for the many blessing in my life are connected, inextricably linked one to the other.
I am grateful to have a spiritual life, one of constant prayer and frequent reflection. It’s quite possible that you can’t tell this from looking at me; I don’t appear to be particularly pious and can be ill-tempered and foul-mouthed in ways that one would not associate with a spiritual being. I am working on all those things, but still have a long way to go toward being the kind of person who remains tranquil and calm under the most trying circumstances, is compassionate and loving toward the most difficult people, and smiles. I almost have that last one down pat. I try to live as best I can as a compassionate, patient, loving, forgiving, caring human being. I often fall short but it is not from lack of effort. I figure that faith and spirituality is like a muscle, if you exercise it, it gets stronger, if you don’t it atrophies and remains weak.
So every day when I wake I reach out to God. Throughout the course of my day I remain in constant conversation with God. At the end of the day as I am winding down, I express my gratitude for the blessings in my life and connect with God before I take my rest. My life is not magically easy for doing this each day, but it is good. Faith in God is not something I necessarily share openly with people around me; I tend to be private with those kinds of things that tend to be misunderstood. I try to let my life speak by trying to keep my heart and mind open and operating with as much integrity as I can. I fail. I make mistakes and fall down. But I get back up, try to learn from my mistakes and keep at it. It is the only way I know how to be until I learn a better way.
I am grateful for this journey. I wouldn’t trade it, though sometimes it seems like it would be easy to cut corners or give up and let go. But no, I’m onto something with this gratitude thing and all the other corollaries that go along with it. I think I’m gonna do as the old song says, “I believe I’ll run on and see what the end’s gonna be.” And so I shall.
