Thank You, Thank You, Thank You….

Whatever you’re asking for in prayer, stop it – at least for a little while each day.

All of us have different prayer lives; we devote differing amounts of time each day to praying. My opening line is intended to have you think about using a bit your daily prayer time to simply say, “thank you, thank you, thank you….”

St. Ambrose, one of the first four Doctors of the Church, put it succinctly more than 1,600 years ago when he said, “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.” Think about it; none of us really do that enough.

Few of us give more than a passing thought to the concept of routinely thanking God for His many blessings. The most important word in that last sentence, in my opinion, is routinely. Thanking God should be a part of our daily prayer routine.

Instead, we ask for more in prayer – as if we have never contemplated the concept of being grateful for what God already has given us.

Maybe a way around this overt selfishness involves the concept of making a real effort to recognize all the blessings God provides each of us every day. Taking the second (or less!) to say “Thank you Lord’ when we recognize such a blessing is one of the best prayers we can say – all day, every day.

Examples?

Driving home recently from an event I was covering for The Message, I glanced to my right to see five white-tailed deer slowly crossing a field in broad afternoon daylight not 50 yards from me. Gods know even better than I how much I love His outdoors. Seeing those deer was a real blessing, and I thanked Him then and there.

Just a few paragraphs above … the phone rang as I was typing this column. It irritated me; I had to stop – and maybe lose my train of thought – to take the call. It was from someone confirming what will be a really nice story for The Message; yes, another blessing. I thanked God again, then and there.

I hope you get the idea. God blesses us many times every day – actually way more times than most of us ever realize, in my opinion. That’s because we don’t work on seeing everything around us – everything happening to us – and all the people we’re encountering as the true blessings God intends. I believe that because it’s the only reasonable explanation I have for how little time we spend in prayerful thanksgiving.

If each of us spent more time seeing God at work in our lives, each of us would spend more of our prayer time just saying, thank you, thank you, thank you….