“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”. Whether or not you’ve learned the rest of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, you almost certainly have this bit memorized. For my own part, I admit that I find those two simple ends to be beyond my feeble means at times. Perhaps you’ve found the same.
Unexpectedly, it is often the neediest times of our lives when we are most inclined to give God glory and to enjoy his presence. Recall with me an early morning scene at camp: You groggily make your way to staff meeting, cradling a cup of coffee (with or without 3 hot chocolate packets depending on your tastes) as the mist rises off of Lake Whitaker. Even before they wake, the overwhelming list of needs of Deerfoot boys are busily running through your mind. And yet, we also can recall a profound gratefulness to God in those times. For all our strength, we are needy at Deerfoot. We ask for God’s help and receive his grace multiple times each day. We would be blind not to take notice of his provision.
If you change the setting, often our mentality changes with it. Something about our lives of mundane normalcy is resistant to the enjoyment of God. Busyness is a factor, but too much time to kill can have the same effect. Both the type-A checklist-ninja and the listless doom-scroller are apt to underappreciate God’s presence and grace.
So how do we glorify and enjoy God in lives that so often gravitate toward the routine, the diverting or the urgent; causing us to ignore the providential?
The solution isn’t necessarily to take on the care and feeding of 10 campers of our own just so we can better appreciate God. It is, instead, to cultivate the discipline of attentiveness to God’s goodness, grace, and presence, whatever our circumstances.
Eugene Peterson writes that “Grace evokes gratitude like the voice of an echo”. In Psalm 103, David calls us to notice God’s grace and echo our gratitude. The relevance of God to every human situation is apparent throughout: In sin, in illness, in victory, in a longing to be satisfied, even in our moments of righteous indignation in an unjust world, God is there. He is good. He is loving. If we can teach ourselves to really notice, we can’t help but be moved to give thanks.
I encourage you to read Psalm 103 and reflect on it this November. Perhaps there are ways you can incorporate a recognition of the grace of God into everyday life. The Psalm demonstrates that however desperate, comfortable, joyful or sad we are, it is incumbent upon us to “forget not his benefits.”
In an effort to apply this in my own life, I’ve modified my exercise routine. As many of you know, I love bikes, and look to ride as often as I can in the autumn months. This year, I’ve identified two places on my home trails where I committed not to ride by without stopping to take a moment and reflect on God’s grace to me. I’ve arrived at those places with any number of thoughts running through my mind – resentment, boredom, eagerness for the awaiting downhill ride, or a sense of obligation. Given time though, these minutes of reflection on God’s daily graces to me have changed my thinking. Where I once stepped off the pedals of my bike thinking, “I have to do this thing”, I now more often arrive and think, “This is the whole reason I’m here”.
I encourage you to look for simple ways to take notice of our God, whose love and grace are lavished on us in so many ways. Let’s try together to notice it and expand our perceptive capacities toward God’s goodness one day at a time. In a way, it’s the whole reason we’re here.
