The power of gratitude.
“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our ‘God is a consuming fire.'”
Fire purifies. Fire protects against enemies.
“But be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them; he will subdue them before you. And you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly, as the Lord has promised you” (Deuteronomy 9:3).
Gratitude is a point of focus,
Bringing our attention back to him,
And the only place worthy of our devotion.
His divinity reaching into the heart of our consciousness..
An all-consuming fire.
Too intimate to really imagine,
Or address at face value,
The experience of being alive is indeed love expanding itself,
Into the universe and from the universe,
The bigness of it
Is hard to reach with words.
It falls easily into esoteric poetry.
But let’s break gratitude all the way down to its most basic power…
When we are grateful,
we are present,
And we don’t fall victim to victim consciousness.
We don’t feel we are owed something that we haven’t received.
We aren’t comparing ourselves to those that seem to have more
or to those who have been seemingly given more blessings.
Instead, we take care of the gifts that we have,
And in focusing on their care, we cultivate more.
We fall into sinlessness,
And we take charge of our lives within the all-consuming fire of God’s love for us.
We align ourselves with his plan for our lives
In the atmosphere of gratitude.
We acknowledge more readily the true nature of reality..
That every moment is a gift and an opportunity to love,
To expand, and
To find presence and the embrace of the infinite.
Interesting how the play of opposites operates….
To better understand gratitude,
Perhaps it’s easier to consider its opposite.
To be ungrateful.
To focus on the burden of life,
How unfair it is,
The ways that you’ve been wronged,
And betrayed,
Left for dead.
How there is no love in humanity,
How evil seems to prevail,
As bad things happen to good people,
And good things happen to bad people.
Both polarities operate.
Both sides of the coin are flipping from God’s hand…
A thumb like a mountain,
Flipping the quarter of the cosmos,
On (or in) your mind that needs to choose heads or tails.
You can focus on what you want here,
And in the courtroom determining the way things actually are,
Whether this world is dark or light,
Whether God’s all-consuming fire is purifying,
Or hellish. (Perhaps both depending on who you are).
Whether you think evil has won or lost,
Or the righteous are dancing on Satan’s Grave,
Or falling into his evil maze,
Certainly, cases could be made for both perspectives.
And really…
Would it be interesting if it were any other way?
Let’s take emotion out of it,
Let’s even take devotion out of it,
Let’s just consider it from a strategic perspective.
You have this life,
Made up of days,
Made up
Of hours
Of moments which encapsulate opportunities,
To transcend your station.
And from somewhere (who knows where).
You have a vision or an ideal of the life you want to build…
A purpose buried beneath regret and wasted time,
Living in the chaos of a life spent in misunderstanding and trauma.
Submerged in a humanity that has mostly fallen to the play of evil.
Who will also mostly reflect confusion and resistance,
Towards your attempts to overcome.
Certainly, gravity favors the opposite of gratitude.
Being ungrateful is effortless here. (It also goes well with being self-damning which is also as easy as falling
And even a socially accepted as a sane and rational frame of mind.)
Whereas gratitude has the air of delusion.
Like whistling to yourself on a battlefield.
You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.
I think the reality of life is sometimes easier to understand through the lens of looking back.
Not always….
But in the realm of gratitude,
it’s helpful.
Because we see the gift of life presented without burden from the perspective of looking back.
Take raising a child for example.
A child is a good example because a child is the greatest responsibility (and perhaps burden). Yet also the greatest gift (true love and joy). And like with everything, it depends on your perspective, your mind frame determines everything about the experience of parenthood.
Being grateful. Versus ungrateful is the lever which determines whether something is a gift or a burden.
But taking a child as an example. The stress and responsibility and the sacrifice of it can blind one to the overwhelming blessing of it in the day-to-day reality of it.
But looking back once they are grown. One can easily see what an incredible gift it was to even have that kind of opportunity.
The depth of life experience that that represents. The depth correlates with the difficulty.
The depth correlates with the level of responsibility.
The gamble of life is in the levels of responsibility we take on.
The stakes of success and failure.
Imagine being a parent and in the midst of all its difficulties,
You remain aware and grateful for the gift of experience and opportunity to love.
To share in the unbelievable depth of experience.
To (in a sense) be given the gift of life again,
Through a different channel or being.
Versus.
Thinking of the burden and the sacrifice.
The stress.
The fear the exhaustion etc…
All aspects exist simultaneously.
But… Which frame of mind will lead to a better experience?
So if we drain all the emotion,
And all the devotion,
And all the religion from the concept of gratitude,
And just frame it as a strategy for life,
It becomes even more clear
How smart that approach really is.
One could obviously make a case for seeing life anyway one wants to.
There is a case for total devotion and gratitude,
And there is a case for total nihilism and anger.
But here we are…
In this play of opposites left to determine our experience to one degree or another.
Evil is not our friend.
There are forces actively working against us.
They flood the mind upon first waking up in the morning.
They are the voices reminding you of your failures,
Or chastising you for your lowly position.
They are constantly whispering the suggestion that everything is unfair.
And that you have been left behind and treated wrongly.
They point out lives of others that seem to be much better,
And suggest that your life will never resemble theirs.
In a sense, they (these forces of evil) provoke resentment,
Towards yourself,
Towards God,
Or towards anyone at all who is swimming against all those currents and getting somewhere.
The weapon evil uses against us most often,
The only weapon he really needs, Is anger, resentment,
And the ungrateful attitude that is born from those energies.
What we focus on grows.
And entropy, chaos, and negativity require no effort.
But rather require efforts opposite. Evil is effortless.
To fight it we must implement the “right kind” of effort.
Effort that is rooted in fearlessness and gratitude.
Effort to seek the father,
And to be aligning our will with his.
And so the vastness of the spiritual force we use to battle the energies of evil is adequate.
In other words,
the forces working against us are “other or out there.”
So the forces we need to battle the darkness must be “other and out there” as well.
Gratitude in this case becomes a kind of calling, active prayer.
To have the forces of light line up and align within.
Gratitude could be called the art of spiritual war when framed this way.
Far from a deluded hippy concept,
it is more like a samurai sword made from steel cast by the light of the Lord.
There are some personal benchmarks. We must arrive at
in order to make it to the mountain top called gratitude.
For a start… We have to see everything in our life, all the circumstances of it, all the failures (or lessons), all the betrayals, all the mistakes, every single aspect of it as our responsibility and no one else’s.
In short, we must obliterate (actively) victim consciousness.
Victim consciousness is how evil whispers, and is the disguise evil wears when he approaches you like a so-called friend.
It’s hard to be grateful if you are identifying yourself as a victim.
And if you are taking on the identity of a victim of circumstance, you are in essence disempowering yourself completely.
Gratitude
in the context
could be considered the engine of self-reflection and change.
So therefore,
being ungrateful is that engine breaking down into unconsciousness, entropy, and thwarted effort.
It helps if we see the difficulties of our lives as spiritual blessings shifting us into seasons of growth.
God’s compliment, in a way, showing us his belief in us to overcome obstacles and arrive at new levels of creative achievement, which the hardships were designed to bring out of us.
We don’t evolve in stagnation or ease.
We evolve by being humbled in the difficulties of living.
Gratitude therefore is more than just an adequate reaction to the overwhelming gift of being alive,
But also a pragmatic strategy to fight the spiritual battle we’ve all been born into.
Which we were lucky and honored enough to be born into.
We knew it was going to be difficult before we hit our mother’s wombs.
Don’t you remember bragging at the water cooler in the sky? How we signed up for a difficult ride?
The harder the better, we all laughed as angels. And then cried.
As one by one we were released into chaotic void of personal evolution
Nothing but a far off whispering and whistling spirit of devotion
Understanding at all what could happen.
