13th Sunday after Pentecost 26.8.07 Thanksgiving
People often complain about life and how hard it is. One of the suggested remedies is to count one’s blessings.
Go out and smell the roses, and get in touch with beauty again. This will ease the stress and remind one that life is worth living.
The Gospel of the ten lepers is a standard reminder of the need to give thanks to God for His many blessings to us.
Giving thanks is not just good manners.
Nor is it a cunning way of wrangling another blessing: Thanks for that one, Lord, now can I have another one...
It is more fundamental. It is part of our whole alignment with God in a state of union of being. We are one with Him, and thanks comes naturally in a loving united relationship.
Thanking Him will flow from an attitude of trust that whatever He allows or causes to happen is somehow the best thing for me at that time.
We tend to complain about a lot of things that happen, and we drift back to the question: Why would God do that to me? A loving God? Many reject God at this point.
If we do manage to stay around we can deepen our grasp on His presence in our lives, and this is surely one of the most crucial things to get right. We can’t be in a position where we might have lost the faith by next week if enough things go wrong at the same time. We need to be so cemented in the faith that nothing can move us and all that happens is absorbed in the deep trust between us and God.
This is what St Paul meant by thanking the Lord at all times and the message is repeated many times in Scripture.
We might think it is pious exaggeration, but no, they mean it. We thank the Lord at all times, at any given moment, for His providential love which is shining upon us and working for good.
This puts us in a much better frame of mind, but that is not the main reason we do it. We do it because it is true and because the doing of it actually restores the harmony necessary between Creator and creation.
The very act of thanking Him opens the channels of communication and the love of God can enter in more freely.
It is hard even for God (who can do everything) to answer prayers when they are put in such a complaining and doubting way.
The hardest thing for us is to hold our nerve when things are going badly. At such a time we need to make an affirmation of faith and trust (the Scriptures are full of them) and then wait to see the improvement.
If we go the other way and abandon hope things will continue to go badly and worse still.
But if we hold firm, just like in a battle, then we start to turn the tide.
We could do this for the whole world if enough people would take up the same message.
Our problem as the human race is we have never been united enough. A few people are praying in faith at any one time; the rest are charging like the Gadarene swine.
Yes, some terrible things happen but we can reduce those things by keeping a very close united front with God. It is because we have not stayed close that so many things have gone wrong.
If we do stay close there will be a general improvement in both our attitude and in the things that actually happen.
We must not be distracted by what goes wrong, but keep focused on the simple and unchanging truth that God is Good. All thanks to Him.
