The WAY of Jesus calls us to become deeply aware of the fact that all we have and all that we are, belong to God. We thank God in the Divine Liturgy for every good gift and every perfect gift and we acknowledge that these are from above, coming down from You, the Father of lights. This is from the Ambon Prayer which is a prayer of thanksgiving.
Although we hear this prayed, I wonder how many times we think about what these words mean. Most probably think, I am, sure, that these words refer to the Holy Eucharist which they just received. While these words do include the gift of the Holy Eucharist, the prayer is thanking God for much, much more. It thanks Him for the gift of Life, the gift of Self, the gift of others and even the gift of creation. It thanks God for everything we have and are, even the struggles and challenges.
As you might immediately guess, in order to come to this conclusion a person has to think about God, life and all things in a different manner – in a God-like way.
Most of us feel, I suspect, that the things we have are things that we have earned because of our hard work. Oh contraire! All things, even those that we have purchased through our hard work, are gifts from our loving Creator-God. This is the mindset that we are called to develop when we embrace the WAY of Jesus. The WAY of Jesus calls us to think about things in a different way – to think about things the way that Jesus did. This, of course, means that we see all things as gifts from God.
In order to begin to think about things the way that Jesus did, requires that we first assess our thinking and our ideas or attitudes about things. We should not be ashamed or embarrassed if we don’t think about life and the things of life in this manner. We have been given life in order to learn how to think in this way. We are called by God, through the Person Jesus, to focus our efforts on learning how to think in this fashion. Life is given to us to learn how to be God’s children.
Ask yourself: Do I think about life in this way? Do I realize that I have been given life in order to learn how to be a true child of God? Do I realize that I will probably have to work at changing my way of thinking in order to see like this way?
I’m sure that most will probably immediately think: Why does life have to be so complicated. It really isn’t. When I don’t see like this way I must realize that I don’t want to change!