It is important that we stop and give thanks to God.  Therefore, we are going to engage on a journey of thanking God each day for one thing. Today the focus will be on thanking God for life. Life is something we often take for granted. We wake up and start a new day, cramp it with activities, fall into bed at night and start all over again.  After a while we think that it is our alarm or our own natural bodies that wake us up.  Well it is not.  It is God who has called us awake, just like he wakes up the sun and the birds and all living creatures. Let us give him thanks for that life.  Hallelujah, thank you God for life, for waking me up to see this morning and blowing breath in my body.

God tells us that he come to give us abundant life.    Are you living the abundant life or are you just existing? I greeted someone yesterday and asked how he was doing.   In his words, he was ‘here’. Something tells me that he was going through life painfully not enjoying the abundant life that God wants for us.  What has become very clear to me is that we can look quite normal but actually are not living souls. Notice that when God breathed into Adam and Eve they became living souls.  Similarly, in the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, God told Ezekiel clearly that he would put breath into the bones and they would come to life.  Only when Ezekiel prophesied to the breath on God’s command that the bodies came alive.

So today, take a good look at yourself. Stop and take a deep breath and thank God for giving you another opportunity to live. Make a pledge today that you are going to be grateful for life and you are going live the abundant life and call others to live the same.

Thank you Lord, thank you Lord that you ever thought of me.  Thank you for giving me life and for blowing your breath into me.  Help me to live that life abundantly so that others will be drawn to you always. Amen