Sunshine On My Shoulders

I'm writing this on Thursday. As I write it, it's a beautiful, sunny morning. The wind is supposed to come up later, but right now there's just a nice, gentle breeze. The temperature is pleasant as well.

In other words, it's a nice day. There's nothing that unusual about a nice day, I suppose. We have them from time to time. We probably have them more often than we realize. I say that because as human beings, we tend to remember the bad days a lot more than the good ones. Everyone remembers “the blizzard of '97” or something similar to that. No one remembers “the nice days of '98”. It's just the way we are.

The thing is, though, that we've had almost a week of grey, cloudy, rainy days. I'm not complaining about that, because we really needed the rain. Still, day after day of clouds and rain can get a little tiresome. Then, too, we had a really cold, snowy April, which makes it even worse. I really like warm weather. I'm ready to have some of it, and so far, we really haven't.

So, when we get a nice day like today, it really stands out. It seems like a day to treasure. It seems like a day to get out and enjoy. It seems like a day to celebrate.

I remember, when I was a kid, reading a short science fiction story about a world that had two suns. One of them was always up, so you never experienced night except for one time every fifty years or something like that. The point was that people would be amazed at a starry night if they rarely saw one, but when we see them all the time we get so used to it that we rarely even notice.

This is the same principle. When we have a bunch of nice days, we might enjoy them, but after a while we don't even notice. When we have a bunch of rainy days, though, and then get a sunny day, it stands out. We're almost amazed by it. We appreciate the warmth of the sun. We appreciate the soft, gentle breeze. We appreciate the incredible gift of sunshine that we too often take for granted.

That's true of so much of life. We tend to take a lot of the good things in life for granted. When things are going well, a lot of times we forget to thank God for them. When things aren't going the way we want them too, though, we can be very quick to blame God for that. It's almost like we think God owes it to us to make things go right, so we just accept that without even thinking about it. When things go wrong, though, we feel almost like God has betrayed us somehow.

I do this at least as much as anyone, so don't think I'm pointing a finger here. It's backwards thinking, though. The truth is that God does not owe us anything. There's nothing we can do for God that God could not do without us. In fact, it would probably be easier for God to do it without us. Given the number of times we disobey God, the amazing thing is not that sometimes things go wrong. The amazing thing is the number of times things go right. The amazing thing is the number of good things God does give us. And the other amazing thing, of course, is the number of times we thought things had gone wrong, only to find out later that things had actually gone right after all and we just didn't realize it at the time.

So let's not let the good things God gives us go by without noticing them. Let's appreciate the sunshine. Let's appreciate the rain, too. Let's appreciate the food we eat, the water we drink, and the clothes we wear. Let's appreciate the grass and the flowers and the birds. Let's appreciate the people in our lives, too. And let's thank God for all the wonderful things God gives us.