Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. Col 3:16"Songs, hymns and spiritual songs? I don’t know, Lord. I don’t feel much like singing these days. I’ve tried to be a good Christian, but lately I don’t feel that richness dwelling within me. Where’s the joy you promised? Please explain it to me so that I can understand."
I prayed that prayer not long ago. After years of trying to lead a decent life and discover what it means to be a Christian, I finally reached the point where I felt haunted by my lack of joy. Something was missing from my life, and that scripture made no sense to me at all. Until recently…
"I read a good article yesterday. Think you might like it."
"Oh yeah—?"
I caught a gleam in my friend, Dan’s, eye. We were sitting in a local café. We had already chatted about sailing and about work and about our families, but as he opened his Blackberry and began to scroll through the files I could tell he had something important to share.
"A good article? What’s it about?"
"The different virtues," he said, "and the spiritual wealth hidden within them."
I listened as he continued. He mentioned loyalty and faithfulness. Self-discipline, integrity and strength.
"But the greatest virtue of all," he explained, "is gratitude."
"Gratitude?" That didn’t resonate with me. How about love? Or compassion? "How could gratitude be the greatest virtue?"
"Well," he said, nodding and tapping his Blackberry screen, "think about it—you and I are extremely blessed just to be here."
"Yeah, today I might agree with that, Dan, but there are other times I might not. I don’t always feel blessed. In fact sometimes I feel downright ungrateful."
"Then you need to hear this," he said. "It’s from a book called, A Short History of Nearly Everything, written by a man named Bill Bryson. Listen to what he says…
‘You have been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.’
"The point is," Dan said, "the odds against your being born were astronomical. You shouldn’t even be here. But you’re part of God’s plan. You might even say, He invited you to be here. So you have a lot to be grateful for."
*
This morning I witnessed perfection. The sky, just an hour before devoid of any light, burst forth with living color. The eastern horizon glowed with the warm tinted hues of morning. A light fog drifted skyward from the trees and meadows as if God Himself were lifting it to Heaven.
As I drove along thinking of the beauty and the majesty behind it all, I was reminded of my conversation with Dan and suddenly it all made sense to me. God had invited me to be there, at that exact moment in time, to behold that beautiful sunrise. He wanted me to see it.
Each of us received a personal invitation from Almighty God—to be born, to live on this planet, and to enjoy His marvelous creation. Are you humbled by this? I am, for I now realize my purpose—to love God, to teach and admonish His people, and to praise Him with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. I have been filled with riches and joy, and for that I am eternally grateful.
