I am grateful. I am thankful. I appreciate that I am alive.
I am certain I have felt and said or even wrote affirmations like aforementioned things before. However, today I had these words come to me and I did not anticipate their coming. I was not thinking or mediating on the subject of gratefulness and thankfulness. Yet, to be honest, I cannot recall what it was that I was thinking about. If I were to guess I would say that I was probably thinking about physical pain and suffering. I have had a lot of this in the past several months; I have even gone so far as to entertain the possibility that I have now entered a new place in life, the place all humans must one day enter, namely, the place of death or the preparation for it.
But death or dying was not the subject that I was mediating on when the affirmations came to me of gratefulness, thankfulness, and appreciation.
Instead of trying to recall and describe what I was thinking that may have prompted my experience of gratefulness, let me simply try to convey the feeling itself.
I begin by saying that I felt that I was in a very real conversation with God, yes, the Creator. If He asked me a question, I do not recall. Perhaps He did. All that I recall clearly is that I was sharing my feelings with Him – that I am grateful, that I am thankful, and that I deeply appreciate that He chose to give me life. I am thankful that I have consciousness that I am alive. I am grateful that He gave me the gift to experience life on this planet at this time. I am thankful for my particular life.
I am a child of God, as you are, as we all are. The specific names we give to ourselves that identify us in this world – man, woman, male, female, nationality, religion, race, ancestry, and many other notations we honor ourselves with – underneath it all we are children of our Creator who uniquely loves each one of us individually. This is what I experienced today; perhaps in a new way that I never before quite experienced myself in relation to God.
If I were indeed in a conversation with God our Creator, my answer to God was that I am grateful, that I am thankful, and that I appreciate who I am and my life.
But was I really in a conversation with God? Will God indeed speak with man? I leave the answers to the arguments of theologians, dogmatists, religionists, philosophers, and metaphysicians. I simply report what I feel that I experienced.
I end this short essay where I began – with lingering feelings of gratefulness, thankfulness, and appreciation.