Daily gratitude

One of the greatest temptations we face in our lives is to be over concerned about the future or the past at the expense of the present. C.S. Lewis talks about this in his book The Screwtape Letters. In the book, the demon Screwtape, the master tempter, instructs his nephew Wormwood, who is only a novice tempter, to distract his human from focusing on the present. He encourages Wormwood to turn his human's mind to the future, because then the human will be focusing on things that aren't real, things that are purely imaginative.

Unfortunately, it's a temptation to which we are all too susceptible, and it's a temptation that steals away so much of the beauty of life. When man is solely focused on the future, everything loses it's meaning. What's the point of looking forward to future events if you can't enjoy the present? Won't you end up just looking forward to something else when what you've been looking forward to happens?

It's a trap that we all fall in - as human beings we have dreams and aspirations. In fact, it's a good thing to have goals and to not be too complacent about how things currently are. However, we can't take it too far either and end up missing out on the present. What we can especially miss out on is a sense of gratitude for everything God has given us. By looking forward, we miss out on the gift of the present.

This loss of gratitude is something I've been thinking a lot about recently, especially as I try, and sometimes fail, to live in the present moment. It's a daily struggle, and when I'm not living in the present I definitely notice that I suddenly lose a lot of the gratitude that makes the day worthwhile. If I'm too focused on where life might be heading, or what might lie in the future for my young family and myself, I forget to be thankful that I even have a young family. I begin to take for granted all the beautiful things around me in my quest for those things I don't currently have.

A true gratitude for all the blessings in our life and an over emphasis on the future cannot coexist with one another; one of these sentiments will be victorious in our souls and the other will fall to the wayside. Either we recognize the beauty of things we have now, or we lose sight of the present in order to live in a dreamworld called the future. Gratitude assumes the appreciation of a thing already possessed; we can't be grateful for something that we don't have. The future, though, is by its very nature made up of things that are not yet ours. Thus, if we are to be grateful for what we have then we have to sacrifice the dreamworld that we often create for ourselves. We must reach beyond our fixation with the future, and we must live in the present.

Gratitude is a beautiful gift given to us by God. The ability to rejoice in the fact that He loves us, to rejoice in the many evidences of His love is something specifically reserved for men (and angels). It is a beautiful part of life to be able to appreciate and offer up thanks for all the good things in life. Indeed, it would be terrible to have no one to give thanks to, to live a life where there was not a benevolent God that was the source of all our blessings, and the object of all our thanks. For, how could we offer thanks if we were not thanking someone?

However, we do have a God to whom we can offer thanks. We can take the opportunities throughout the day to offer up thanks to him in our hearts for all the blessings He's given us. We just need to get our minds out of the future and into the present to do so.