I am an ungrateful child.
The other day a young man who I had worked with in the past achieved something very significant. As a gesture of good will, he came to visit me on the day that he made this achievement and when he did this, he was very excited to bring me a generous gift as a sign of his thanks for the work we had done together.
I had not been expecting a thank you from this young man, and I was genuinely surprised to hear from him, but I was delighted by the gesture of his thanks and I was touched that he had remembered the effort I had made in my work with him some time ago.
And I have been thinking about this over the last few weeks. You see, I would have helped this young man in any case. I liked him as a human being and respected him as a person and I believed in the importance of what he was doing, and as a result I was determined to help him in whichever way I could to ensure that he was able to achieve the things that he was aiming to achieve. But that thank you was very important to me.
That thank you showed me that he remembered the impact of the things that I had done and that I was able to make a positive impact on his life.
And I have been thinking about that today as I have been thinking about God Himself and how little I thank Him for His work in my life. God is in every single part of my existence. Without God the sun would not rise in the morning and the breath would not come in and out of my lungs. And yet, even though it is God Himself who is responsible for my very existence – not only my conception in my mother’s womb, but also my existence in every moment since then until the eternity that I hope to spend in Heaven – I never thank Him for it.
Now, I complain a lot. A whole lot of complaining can consume me. But this idea that I would need to actually stop my complaining for long enough to say thank you once in a while for the miracle of my existence is sort of foreign to me.
And I have been thinking about what that means. Well, it means that I am an ungrateful child. I am the child who comes home from school, asks their mother what is for dinner and then promptly complains that it is not nice enough or good enough or worth my time and effort to eat it.
And as a mother with children who complain about dinner quite a bit, it seems to me that I have much work to do to become a grateful child of the Eternal God… And today I pray for the Grace to be able to achieve that…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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