Gratitude - Day 18

if you've been following this series at all you will have observed that there was no post for yesterday.  There should have been one from me...so I own that.  I'd love to say that it was for good reason, and maybe there is some good in the reason, but the reason itself wasn't good.  It was decently immature to be fairly transparent.  At the time that I sat down to actually post, I wasn't feeling at all like I wanted to post something shiny and clean on being "grateful".  I wasn't feeling it.  Actually I thought that I wasn't feeling it, but the reality is that I wasn't feeling "thankful" ... I wasn't feeling "happy" ... and to be quite truthful I have been seeing all sorts of 30 day social media oriented expressions of "thanks" and "thankgiving" and I lost the focus of what I had intended this series to be.  Not to take away anything from the others who are posting thoughts of thanks and thanksgiving, but I fear, and it has come to pass in my own life, that there is a danger in confusing more subjective feelings and remembrances of thanks that can condition our present state of mind with an attitude of gratefulness that can supply a foundation of how we see ourselves, particularly in light of our Creator.
It's like the Scrooge opinion that "anything can affect the senses... a blot of mustard, a bit of under done potato"... and I was having an underdone potato kind of day.  If we at all live in the midst of relational humanity we are subject to thoughts of happiness, discouragement, anger, frustration, hurt.  If these are our foundation, our days will be as subjective as the one who sets out to row a solo voyage across the Atlantic.  We are subject to the momentary wind, waves, sun, and currents of the culture around us.  Focusing on the moment lets us experience only the moment.  When we look onto the bigger picture, the distant shore that we are rowing too, and the knowledge that we have been given all that we need to get there, it is only there that the larger picture of gratitude can be found.  It is so much bigger than a day...and lets be honest, its so much bigger than a month.  I hope that I realize this when the page on my calendar once more reads 1.