According to Genesis as God was creating the heavens and the earth, “he” would create some new element (fashioning light and calling it “day” and calling the darkness “night,” and all the various other God was doing) and would look back at everything at the end of the day and see that it was good. Every day God created something really cool and at the end of it looked around and decided, “Yep, that’s pretty good.” I am a believer in evolution, the big bang, and the many scientific explanations for how we got to be here. That said, there is something very beautiful in the language of the creation story as told in the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It stirs the imagination to think about something so wondrous being envisioned and created out of the formless void.
So what does this have to do with gratitude? Well now I feel kind of silly about it, but today I felt such a sense of accomplishment that by 3 p.m. I looked around at all that I had gotten done and definitely saw that it was good. I woke late this morning (around 8:30) and wrote in my journal as usual before starting into my kind of typical Sunday kinds of things; laundry, cleaning, and grocery shopping are the regular order of the day. But some days feel different than others, and this was one of those days. I dug into the day’s activities with unexpected vigor and enthusiasm, extending my normal cleaning activities to include thoroughly cleaning out the microwave and (gasp) scrubbing all four drip pans under the burners on my stovetop and even the yucky space underneath them. I’m telling you I was on a roll, and the majority of my work was done before I headed out to the store at 1 p.m.
This represented an unusual spurt of industriousness that I don’t often exhibit. Sometimes I don’t have the energy or inclination to engage in what perhaps seems like mundane undertakings–which they are–choosing instead to sit somewhat idle and do very little of any measurable value. Don’t get me wrong: sometimes after a tiring week I don’t see anything wrong with totally crashing on the sofa for some part or most of a weekend simply to allow my body and mind the rest and recovery time it needs to be able to function during the week. But today, even as I would finish one task, I had the energy and enthusiasm to take up another, and at the end of it I put my hands on the hips, nodded in satisfaction and saw that it was good.
What can I say? Tonight’s blog is a little quirky. But I am indeed grateful for the feeling of having had a good day in which I managed to get a lot of things done, and not simply done, but done with gusto. I went above and beyond today and have the shiny drip pans and clean sheets to show for it. And as I prepare to close things down for the evening and take my rest, I can look upon my various creations and accomplishments and say it is good. And for that I am most satisfyingly grateful.
