On weekdays during Advent we are posting the daily reflection from our Abundance Advent booklet here on our blog. You can download the booklet in its entirety here.
I have been greatly blessed by God’s abundance. It is hard to stay within the boundary of one year for the measure of this abundance because God’s blessings on me are a lifetime of gifts. He showers blessings on me in all of my days and sometimes it takes a while for me to recognize the abundance.
Just recently I have been thinking about what to give my children as Christmas presents this year and I am coming up mostly empty. I spoke to them and they too say “I don’t know because I have so much.” It was tradition in our family to give limited gifts at Christmas so we could focus on its true meaning, the gift of Jesus Christ to all of us from the Father. Even my chore list is a measure of the abundance of God. My sink of dirty dishes yells out the great gift of food that God has provided for me. My pile of laundry speaks to the blessings of clothes the Lord has gifted to me. My dusty and cob-webby rooms reminds me of the shelter my Father has provided me. And then I go to my home, which is wherever my family is at any given time. My daughters are the joy of my life. Their abundance of success is my abundance of success. They are smart, funny interesting people and that is because God is alive in their hearts and minds. And then beyond that, I am blessed in abundance with my husband, who is kind and loving, who brings an abundance of laughter and fun into my world. He came with children and they came with more love for me to give abundantly and receive. And I could spend the rest of my days telling you about the abundance that comes along with my grandchildren. If you know me, I probably have already done that to you.
I can’t turn around without seeing another gift in my life from God. He has blessed me with more grief and heartache (yes, blessed me, stay with me here) and in that grief and heartache I found friendship, love and reasons to rely on God. I may have felt as desperate as I ever could and He found me and held me in His loving arms. God touched the hearts of people around me to provide me with the things I needed to get through those times, one of which was the gift of my beloved Bernard. And then He gave His grace to me. He forgave me for doubting Him and He forgave me for leaving Him and He forgave me for yelling out at Him and He forgave me for so much more.
God has abundantly blessed this world with such beauty as the eye could ever want. Take a drive across our beautiful county and see what gifts He put along the way. There is an abundance of love and gratefulness in my heart that is yet another abundant gift from God. I only know love because He loved me first. Probably, more than any other gift in abundance that God has blessed me with is time. I know that in the big scheme of things I am not very old, but God has decided in His great abundance to give me time every day to experience all of the above in abundance. I try every day to remember to thank Him for everything.