Gratitude Journal - Day 18

Today I am grateful for the promise that God offers us each and every day.

The promise of love, grace, joy, forgiveness, fulfillment.

The promise of life. 

The promise of renewed life. 

I'm reminded of the promise that God made to Sarah. 

How she laughed when told she was destined to become a "Mother of nations"...at the still young age of 90.

The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, as usual, said it best in her book, Gospel Medicine:

         "It is a hard thing, to believe in a promise - to live by it, day after day, to see it in the night sky and hear it in your name and see it again as your lover's eyes.  It is a hard thing to believe in a promise with no power to make it come true.  Everything is in the future tense - the land, the son, the blessing. Everything will happen, by and by, but in the meantime what is there to live on now?

          And yet. What better way to live than in the grip of a promise, and a divine one at that?  Who in her right mind would give that back?  To wake every morning to the possibility that today might be the day.  To remain wide awake all day long, noticing everything - the way the shade of the olive tree processes from west to east, and how the smell of the fields changes from green grass to yellow hay as the sun heats up overhead.  To search the face of every stranger in case it turns out to be an angel of God.  To take nothing for granted.  Or to take everything as granted, though not yet grasped.  To handle every  moment of one's life as a seed of promise and to plant it tenderly, never knowing if this moment, or the next, may be the one that grows. 

          To live like that is to discover that the blessing is not future but now.  The promise may not be fully in hand.  It may still be on the way, but to live reverently, deliberately, and fully awake - that is what it means to live in the promise, where the wait itself is as rich as its end.  All it takes are some regular reminders, because as long as the promise is renewed, the promise is alive, as vivid as a rainbow, as real as the million stars overhead."