By John Remaniak · Business Manager
Here at Grove City, we are placed in a field of opportunity. It is an opportunity for gratitude. Living here, I have learned that gratitude is a heart posture molded by prayer, supported by humility and challenged by pride. Though we are in a pasture, we can find dependence through a lens of gratitude.
One way to describe prayer is to liken it to passing through a field of flowers. The flowers are daily blessings that are tangible moments of grace. On the paths of life, like the Israelites, we are given manna or small breadcrumbs of faith that sustain us. Even still, we are stiff-necked people.
We consume or covet and abuse grace. We turn to gluttony amid our mistrust after having just been provided for by our heavenly father. We choose disobedience, but God is still there, waiting for us to come back.
In life, to confront our stiff-neckedness, we are also given moments of darkness or spiritual uncertainty. In prayer, the light onto our path is one that seldom ever illuminates more than just the next step. In our wandering, we stumble even when we think we are on the right trail. There is nothing else to be done but to keep getting back up to find the daily manna in perseverance of prayer, keeping a heart posture of gratitude.
Ingratitude is inspired by self-sufficiency fostered and rooted in the restlessness of pride. There can be no end in pride when it is grown from an ego only learning from an environment driven by insecurity. For that ego will only generate self-fulfilled prophecies as it frets over its own lusts. In the eyes of ego, lust of possession and vanity are desirable. This self-gratification reduces the best accomplishments to vanity. This feeds into the fact that pride cannot see itself as vulnerable enough to be loved. It cannot be grateful for the provision that it did not want within its perspective.
Pride does not seek forgiveness, because pride does not seek itself to be seen as it is. It seeks loveless pity or manipulated appreciation. It festers in the restless heart because it does not have the capacity for contriteness necessary to know and extend mercy. Pride grows only in its stagnant cyclical nature of fake intimacy upon misplaced identity.
In the same way, we all have said, “I cannot serve (in) humility.” That would dismiss being transformed by humility and gratitude. “I can be the master of my own fate,” though we know this will reproduce the same insecure image of self being made manifest. Because in that hardened heart, only the ideal self can be loved within pride’s twisted craving of disorderly received admiration.
Consequently, in prideful judgment, we forget our identity and reveal our ingratitude for what gifts and light we have been given in our fallen state of helpless dependence on God. We seldom remember our dual identity of ephemeral dust and divine adoption. Humility is key to unwrapping gratitude. You have probably heard that comparison is the thief of joy, which makes it the crippler of gratitude.
When we see others on different paths and focus on our complaints and judgments toward others, we feel justified in our posture of self-perceived righteousness. Even if we have enough reason to believe our position to be better than another, there needs to be a limit to the endless pursuit of comparison and praying for things to be justified in our own time rather than according to God’s good plan.
Gratitude is the sight of the heart — a grace-filled view of light by which we see. Every reminder of incarnational gifts in creation can only be treasured if it is seen through this lens. With or without manna, we should find and treasure the daily flowers.
They are reminders of beauty in a field in which we can gather up grace, presenting a bouquet to our intentional God who did not have to make the world beautiful.
So, find someone to walk with you in the field, reminding you to fix your heart’s sight, to collect the flowers and to pick up the manna when it comes to us. They can develop an intentional and transparent relationship with you, keeping you accountable in their wisdom. They can help you to keep coming back to the God who never deserted you.
