June 19, 2019 – Wednesday 11^th Week in OT

2 Cor 9:6-11; Mt 6:1-6,16-18

“How grateful are you today?”

Gratefulness makes us see what surrounds us, both the good and the bad. Gratefulness allows us to be embracing and accepting of the things and people around us. It is when we are grateful too that we become joyful persons and will tend to see the goodness and uniqueness of others.

Through this joy within us, we also become aware of God’s tremendous generosity to us despite our weaknesses and sins. And when we become joyful, we also become generous of ourselves towards the people around us, no matter who they are, whether they are our friends or strangers.

However, if our heart is without gratefulness but rather bitter, hateful and vengeful because of our personal failures and failures of others towards us, then, we become close-minded, rejecting, and vicious in the way we relate with one another and even in the way we relate with God.

An ungrateful heart makes us belittle ourselves and belittle others, jealous of the success of our friends, but having low self-esteem. In fact, this will make us to be negative and complaining about everyone and everything else. We become stingy and ungenerous in our relationships especially in the way we treat others.

Paul in his letter to the Corinthians reminds us to be generous, to give ourselves without sadness and mere compulsion but to give with joy. Indeed, God loves a cheerful giver who does not count the cost but gives with full of heart. This kind of attitude will only come from a grateful person who knows that everything is a gift from God and confident that God gives abundantly.

Thus, when a person grows to be grateful, the person also becomes more aware of the presence of God, the giver of blessings and gifts. However, when we become ungrateful we also take for granted the giver of gifts, and thus, the presence of God in our life.

And to remain ungrateful is to refuse to recognize that everything we have is a gift. When we become ungrateful persons, we also become self-entitled. We become demanding in our relationships. We become critical of those people around us and we tend to only see what is wrong in the other person. We will become stingy of our time and energy and ungenerous of our resources and presence to those who are asking for our help. And most of all, we become indifferent to people around us and indifferent to God, the source of all blessings.

Thus, God calls us today to be more grateful of the gifts and blessings that we have received each day, no matter how small would that be. But if we have received so much also, be more thankful and be more generous too. Remember, a grateful person is a person who goes forward, because when we are grateful we also become contented of the present, whatever there is. We also become reconciled with the past, whatever that was. And we become hopeful and positive of the future, whatever there will be. Hinaut pa.

Jom Baring, CSsR