Thanksgiving is to be done every day
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Every day is another chance to be thankful
- Category :Spirituality
Faith, hope and charity are virtues which God says we all need and these are also ways in which God makes His home in us. Through these virtues we also make our home in God. Of these three virtues God says the most important is charity.
Charity is another name for love. God says that the most important of all commandments is to love, to have charity. We must love God and our neighbours which includes our enemies as well. Our lives as pilgrims are one of charity where we belong to a community of God fearing people who seek to heal the world through love. Through love we experience God’s forgiveness and our minds have a change in direction and sensation, which now is attuned to God. If we remain in our sinful state, rejecting or neglecting God’s forgiveness, we remain in a state of amnesia where our memory experiences numbness.
Sin makes us pretend to be someone else. We seek out the acceptance of other people. We construct a false persona instead of living our true selves, the self that God created us to be. But with faith we journey into the darkness destroying all false idols. We experience the beauty of God, of ourselves and of our neighbours and creation that living in the love of God brings. Beauty is not threatening nor does it bully us. We were created beautiful, good from the beginning of creation. As long as we are living as children of God we are beautiful. It is when we divert from God that we lose our beautifulness. Sin is ugly and makes us ugly. Therefore, we are to nurture our friendship with God as our mere existence is because of Him and a gift that we are to cherish.
We must be fuelled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. We must rise each day being thankful for the smallest of things. We must not wait for big successes to raise our hands, our voices, or our hearts in thankful praise, but be appreciative for the smallest of mercies. This is how we show charity. To love without intelligence is just expressing shallow emotions. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to purify our love of all that is condescending, dominating and manipulative. Let us cleanse our eyes of any cynicism that we may have that is unwarranted. When we have a pure heart, everywhere we look and whatever we see, we are to see God. Loving God does not mean that we will be safe from all harm. Actually we experience crucifixion just as His Son Jesus experienced. Violence breeds violence, and repression brings retaliation. These are not of God. These are sins, a departure from God and His will. Sin, though it appears glamorous at times, is empty, banal, and impotent. Overall sin is nothing but sadness. We believe that we need absolute power to secure ourselves and to maintain control, but absolute power breeds impotence, emptiness. Too many of our young people are yearning and exhausting themselves for this type of power leading them to become empty zombies in our neighbourhoods. What we should be seeking instead is God’s grace as His graces is the source of all security.
We must desire to simply enjoy what is given to us. We must rest from the endless desires of consumerism and pleasures of the flesh. The destiny which God has in store for us is a life of happiness centred in God. We must learn to see love’s little victories and be thankful for them. This is true freedom and it allows us to live out our destiny. Destiny is the summons and invitation of the God of love and we should be thankful and show such thanksgiving by returning love and using our creativeness. Worry does not bring happiness, it actually takes away happiness and nothing is gained by being anxious. We have to be attuned to ourselves before we can be attuned to others. Often the things we dislike in others are what we refuse to face in ourselves. Not dealing with these issues plunges us deeper and deeper into sadness. We develop hardness of heart or a heart of stone, and we drift farther and farther from our happiness rooted in the thanksgiving of God.
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