Breathing
abigailjoystevens.substack.com
Yesterday's breaths are gifts I've forgotten while looking for today's allotment and finding that what I thought was my due is yet another grace from you. It's your breath in my lungs that I spent like petty cash. These borrowed diamonds I squirreled away were gifts from your generous hand. Do you delight in giving when greedy lungs forget to give thanks? Do you desire to relieve labor when requests turn into demands? Or do you withhold as we panic fearing you a capricious god? No, Heaven's bank verily bursts with the reimbursement for my careless spending, as all my breaths are numbered against Christ, breathing on my behalf. He forever paid all I hoarded, ten thousand more than I took now spent unto his father instead. So if God should give me more today, even more for this rebel ingrate, may I rejoice that there's enough for me and there was yesterday too.
Rebel Ingrates we are. Daily life can consume our moment by moment focus on those things we consider important stuff, and, relatively, they are. I am often catching myself in that mode, inching to the brink of anxiety. “DENNIS!!!, would it throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of some great celestial plan, (to paraphrase Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof), if i didn’t ‘get it done right now’, fix it today?’ ... or ever? Why not back off, up to about eight miles high for a more realistic perspective and focus on the dozens of blessings you are not noticing and being grateful for??? - I heard recently on KWAVE that psychological studies have shown - people who practice expressing gratitude to God and others are much happier than those who don’t.