Thank You, Lord, for that Sweet Time Had

Awash in tears of present sorrow for the realisation that one season has now just in fact given way to another, we stand numb, but with a choice... that to praise or not.

Family are provided for mutual blessing. We grow together. At times this involves the strains that are getting to know and accept each other. These times too can involve some tearing, where fear controls the rapport.

But just as much our families provide us with emotional fulfilment beyond reason—to the point we can no longer rationalise or finds words to communicate. When we’ve had to say goodbye, whether temporarily or permanently, we hold our emotional breaths, saddened by what now must happen.

Another, Better Route

This here is a struggle. It’s not an easy place to get to, but it does involve a choice. All we can realistically do is praise God for the time, to enjoy again and again the highlights of our most recent interactions; to live an ‘alive’ sense of life for the very memory of those times.

As the tears and forlorn demeanour give way, then, to the way of praise—even for little moments—we enjoy God’s perspective.

Mutually we’re thanking each other. We don’t often think of God thanking us, but how pleased is he of us that we’ve chosen the harder yet wiser way; that ancient ‘narrow’ way that few take? It’s taking time out to be grateful and to shelve the fear for something altogether stronger, more truthful and sustainable so far as our souls are concerned.

Thanking is a Choice

To thank is simply an act that is chosen. We’re saddened for we pine to have that time again or we re-live it without the cherished member’s presence. As easily we revert to what they mean to us; thankful we even had these times at all. And we believe we gave our mutual best in these encounters; the best we had on us at the time.

Acts are decisions enacted.

Even as we thank God but don’t yet feel thankful, God’s building in us a sweeping joy that we will perceive but won’t understand, but it’s one we’ll indeed appreciate.

God’s perhaps also reminding us also of the preciousness of life, and of every human being—his creation each one—that comes into our lives and spreads their own form of love and hope through our spirits, consciousness and beings. Yet, we’re not usually thinking of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in these ways—as God’s first and foremost.

Shared with us these are, for our fulfilment unto life—and theirs too. But most of all it’s God who’s fulfilled, seeing the effect of life as it was destined to be lived out i.e. in love.

We’re purposed in nothing more certainly than to accept our prevailing destinies as they reach us, thanking God for the interceding minute, his Presence and for memory of what has now passed.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.