Blog 1730 – 06.18.2020

Never Enough, The Short View

It is a point of view, an attitude many of us adopt early in life from disillusioned, frustrated, and often disappointed parents, themselves also raised my parents quicker to criticize than to praise. The best picture of a parent to me in the Bible is the Prodigal Son’s dad, happy to have his young son finally home again. And the two loveliest words a parent or god ever uttered or ever will are, “Well done.” The Baird they say coined the phrase, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” Prone to err men have painted this picture of a Divinity insatiable for praise and worship from the Volcano god, to the butcher god who must have blood to turn away his wrath. How could such a horrific picture ever be reconciled with a God of Love.

The very idea that an all knowing, all powerful, all benevolent god needs anything from us is ludicrous. But the first and easiest bad attitude picked up and sustained is ingratitude – to always see the cup at best half empty and no matter the pleasures and treasures that surround us to see this world and everything in it as never enough.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O9TSiE35PKzupP8NjHY7QDRKHN4HWngE/view?usp=drivesdk
Never Enough

Yet another song says, “Fathers be good to your daughters for daughters will love like you do.”

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lUqgqaCQwFcJ9u_187kXQNLYBbf6OKQv/view?usp=drivesdk
Fathers Be Good To Your Daughters

This is also true of mothers and sons as well. Our worst and weakest habits we pass on generation after generation with our irrational prejudices and deepest dissatisfactions. And yet as Paul wrote in First Corinthians chapter thirteen, “I show you a more excellent way…the greatest of these is love.” Paul and I have not always agreed and probably never will but we do on this point. It is never about the grades, the performance, the profit margin so much as it is about an attitude of gratitude. That is the secret to getting and giving the greatest happiness in this life and any to come.

When we find ourselves forever critical, unhappy, unsatisfied we need look to no one else, not even our parents or God to blame for that. It is just an old habit we picked up and should have quit a long time ago. How long since you heard yourself saying to anyone especially yourself, “Well done” or “My cup is running over”? These are phrases we all need in our vocabulary, words that want repeating often and with gusto. Next time you feel the urge to give someone a piece of your mind give them a piece of your heart instead. It is a lot bigger than you think, and having said the most needed words the same will echo back to you, “Well Done.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White