Grateful for Gratitude

I feel badly for atheists and agnostics.

Imagine a cool, autumn afternoon. The trees have surrendered to their fall colors. The air is crisp and the aroma of someone barbecuing a few doors down wafts your way. A satisfied smile creeps onto your lips for you’ve just completed a good day at work. You step outside and look up to see a beautiful sunset. Oranges, pinks, and yellows explode across the sky. Enormous clouds force the colors further and provide a majestic presence that makes you feel so small.

Imagine seeing that as an atheist! You see something so incredible and then have no source toward which you can give thanks. You could definitely admit that the scene is beautiful, but you have no one on whom to let that gratitude land. It is an inhale without an exhale, a bouncing ball that doesn’t rebound, or musical scale that doesn’t resolve. Something is just incomplete.

Gratitude is an incredible thing. It allows us to experience the fullness of a moment by ensuring the moment doesn’t stay a mere moment. Gratitude for the moments compels us to a closer walk with God. For the atheist a sunset is just a sunset. They see it and move on. The moment was nice, but then it is gone. For the Christian, we see the sunset and we have God to worship. The sunset doesn’t stay by itself. It becomes an occasion to realize the greatness and love of God. Gratitude unites us to a person, making the experience of a good thing even better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude as of late. These last number of weeks I’ve experienced many blessings. You’ve read about some of them if you’ve been following along with this blog. But as “normal life” is going to start up soon, what I love the most is not the things that I’ve been able to experience but the God who gave them to me. I’m grateful for gratitude because moments come and go. Yet, through these moments I’ve been able to see the love of an unchanging savior. For “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” James 1:17.

Be grateful. Don’t just enjoy a moment; enjoy the God who gave it to you.

p.s.
The image above is sunset over the Isle of Patmos.