Great is Thy Faithfulness

[This a simple reflection I wrote as I meditated over the famed song]

As we travel at times without much reflection, we’re most certainly unaware of the great chasm of grace resplendent over us—the inverted chasm of heaven—the paradoxical chasm; one real beyond reality. There is only one appropriate response to this grace: gratitude.

So many of God’s great blessings go before us and past us completely undetected as we serendipitously serenade life. And it’s not just God that’s robbed, we are too.

His faithfulness emergent in everyday golden mercies—allowing us to live—is so utterly and dynamically voluminous we can’t grasp the totality of them. But as surely as we live these are there.

I learned recently of the bee catastrophe that is sweeping all countries of our world; all barring Australia that is. Apparently a particular bee mite is causing devastation to entire populations of bees. We hardly even think what ecological imbalance a bee-less life would produce... and yet we think ignorantly, “Bees, they sting don’t they?” [As if that’s all they do.] We don’t think past that to their actual function—to assist in pollinating fruiting plants. Imagine a third of our food source wiped out overnight. God has shown us his faithfulness in the provision of the common bee—a creature we take for granted, or worse, loath in fear of.

Morning by morning it is possible to take hold of these incomprehensively small yet sufficiently significant mercies—scooping up with our metaphorical fingers the gorgeous delight of a redeemed and heavenly life. It’s the appreciative life where the common place is marvelled at. Imagine the thrill of taking a deep breath—knowing how the oxygen massages and feeds every living cell in our bodies.

And for each of these valuable portents we entreat the wisdom of God as being wholly faithful—always devouring the worst of our fears such that we might be truly free to live and really come to appreciate all of what is there in the here-and-now.

All that we need truly is provided us—all that is deemed worthy for us. Our God—the Divine being who has no personal favourites—is sure to continue past this present day in his faithful action.

Or so we hope and suppose.

And still it beckons us to live life on purpose knowing that in all ways we’re blessed. Today is the day the Lord has made. We are to be very simply joyful and glad in it.

It is the only sensible way to live life.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.