Gratefulness for God's Abounding Love

GRACE/ ID QUOD VOLO

As we begin another week, we ask God to grant us the grace to have a more profound experience of His abounding love so that our hearts may always be filled with gratitude.

REFLECTION

Today, we live in a world of rapid change. We sometimes find this constant change disconcerting and unsettling. We seem to need at least some constants in our lives.  We find change easier to manage if some things remain the same. In order to come to terms with change, especially very significant change, we need some element of reliable stability.

In the midst of even the most radical changes, the love of God remains constant, because God Himself remains true. God’s love will never pass away.  His love will continue to abound even when all else passes. In the midst of disconcerting change and when everything else is shifting, we deeply trust that God’s love is steady.

We just have to recognize our need to connect with God and for an intimate relationship with Him.  Our profound experience of God’s abounding love will help us keep steady even when all else seems ready to fall apart.  

Henri Nouwen shared a parable about an old man who used to meditate each day near the Ganges River in India.

One morning he saw a scorpion floating on the water. When the scorpion drifted near the old man he reached to rescue it but was stung by it.  A bit later he tried again and was stung again, the bite swelling his hand painfully and giving him much pain. 

Another man passing by saw what was happening and yelled at the old man, “Hey, stupid old man, what’s wrong with you?  Only a fool would risk his life for the sake of an ugly, evil creature.  Don’t you know you could kill yourself trying to save that ungrateful scorpion?”

The old man calmly replied, “My friend, just because it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting, does not change my nature to save.”

It is God’s nature to save because it is God’s nature to love—to heal and to forgive. God seeks the lost, heals the wounded, forgives the offender and gives hope to those who are in despair. It is what God does because it is who He is—He is love, He is mercy and compassion personified.  The nature of God will never change.  

St. Ignatius of Loyola’s “First Principle and Foundation”— as an introductory meditation of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises – reminds us that God created us out of love.  God continues to create us each moment of our existence.  God’s abounding love is the source and continuing foundation of our lives.  Thus, this fundamental truth must evoke in us the desire to praise, reverence, and serve God.  

The Principle and Foundation announces that the world and everything in it is the product of God’s love.  Everything that exists is a gift from the hands of a loving God.  According to St. Ignatius of Loyola, “The other things on the face of the earth are created for us human beings…”  Thus, as created and loved beings, we have to see everything as a gift from God.  Everything points our minds and hearts to the Giver of all good gifts.  Gifts are gifts only when they keep us in touch with a giver.  The moment we lose touch with the giftedness of any aspect of our lives, we lose touch with the Giver of all gifts.  Thus, the Principle and Foundation urges us to be aware of the giftedness of our lives.  This awareness leads us to trust in God, an assurance that His love is never exhausted or limited even despite our failures, shortcomings, and sinfulness.

We must not take for granted all the gifts that God has given us.  We must be grateful.  We are grateful persons if we take nothing for granted.  We grow in our ability to be grateful by taking time to get in touch with our gifts and see the connection between the gifts and the Giver of all gifts.  To have a grateful heart is to be able to see all of Creation as gifts from a loving God.

For our prayer:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A PRAYER OF GRATITUDE

Gracious God, in the busy-ness of my day, I sometimes forget to stop to thank you for all that is good in my life. My blessings are many and my heart is filled with gratefulness for the gift of living, for the ability to love and be loved, for the opportunity to see the everyday wonders of creation, for sleep and water, for a mind that thinks and a body that feels. I thank you, too, for those things in my life that are less than I would hope them to be. Things that seem challenging, unfair, or difficult. When my heart feels stretched and empty, and pools of tears form in my weary eyes, still I rejoice that you are as near to me as my next breath and that in the midst of turbulence, I am growing and learning. In the silence of my soul, I thank you most of all for your unconditional and eternal love. Amen.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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