Part 5 of 5.
Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing week. Sunday morning brings a new start, another round of seven days. Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing year. Jan. 1 brings another cycle of days and weeks and months. We are a rare set of generations, who are able to have said Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing century, a new cycle of years, and Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing millennium, a new cycle of centuries.
In truth, they are all reflections of the daily celebration — new sets of dawns, new sets of awakenings, new sets of stretching rested limbs and reaching for purpose and meaning.
A week ago I was agnostic on the concept of affirmation. Then I happened to decide I wanted to write about a most innocuous phrase — “Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing day” — and for a night I strove to remember that phrase, trying to hold onto it so I wouldn’t forget it in the morning, another victim of my seeming refusal to sleep with writing implements next to the bed.
In the morning I was a prime example of the old saw, “You become what you think about,” “As a man thinks, so he is.” I was grateful for having held the thought all night, but more important, I was optimistically thanking God for this most amazing day. I was seeing the miracle in a new day bursting with potential. I didn’t drag myself out of bed thinking, Oh, Lord, I’m stiff and sore and what am I going to write about and do I even care to write anything today. I sprang to my writing room, grabbed my journal and wrote, “Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing day.”
And so I am a convert of sorts. I always bought into the concept, but now I have inadvertently discovered how to do it “right”: Hold that thought. Keep in the back of your mind that there’s something important you want to remember, and it will surface and sustain.
Actually, that’s not quite true, is it? I have had plenty of times, mostly after vivid dreams, when I woke in the night determined to remember, only to be left with merely a vague memory of the feeling but no details when morning arrived. Why did it work this time? I can’t honestly say, unless there was something divine or supernatural at play, or unless the words drilled the feeling into me, or unless the words expressed simply and efficiently a truth I’d been struggling to express for a very long time, or unless — why am I overthinking this? I’m simply glad, grateful and happy the phrase survived the night, because now I’m locked into committing that attitude to paper and to practice.
Thank you, Lord, for this most amazing day, for a new dawn, another rebirth like the thousands you gave me before and the unknown many ahead, but most of all for this one, today, when I have direct control over my actions. It’s up to me to negotiate the twists and turns, and it’s likely to be quite the journey, because every day is a small version of the longer and bigger journey we all travel, each in our own way. May I hold this spirit of gratitude in my heart the rest of the way.