From "I" to "WE"

Nothing worthwhile is done alone--absolutely nothing.

Our parents gave us life, without which we would not exist. Someone provides electricity we use, fuel for warmth and transportation, water filtration systems and standards on which we rely every day, constabulary and military order that keeps a general order of life and peace in America, amply stocked markets where food is readily available at a moments notice, freedom to move about and live, speak, work, dream, study, read, learn, grow, build, prosper, think, and share ideas with only the limits of our own imagination to hinder our potential--even the opportunity to purport any religious belief we desire is provided with protection of the law to do so.

Here in our modern world, we have some of the greatest opportunity to learn and grow ever witnessed by human kind--the immediacy of information gives one the option to learn anything desired at the push of a button, many times without going outside the comfort of home. In all this, there is a sense of entitlement that all of this and more is somehow owed us, without the slightest hesitation to wonder who provided the opportunity to begin with.

With all this provision and abundance in which we live and work every day, gratitude for the unlimited opportunity presented in every day life is often obliterated by the notion that someone did something bad to us, or something bad happened along the way that ruined us, and that something or someone is given the power to control the outcome of our entire future existence. In essence, we give up control of our own happiness, because we are not willing to be honest about what we truly--in our deepest selves, desire the most--meaningful human connection, the ability to see beyond our own misgivings, shortcomings and offendedness to allow that someone came before us and paved the way for our very existence and the opportunity to decide for ourselves how we think, live, work, and play.

In Holy Scripture, in Psalms chapter 77, the author Asaph cries out to God wondering why The Almighty will not respond, why God will not come to his aid and provide him the comfort of what the author calls, in verse 5, "the good old days." In verse 11, Asaph suddenly shifts into a perspective of gratitude: "But then I recall all you have done, O Lord; I remember your wonderful deeds of long ago. They are constantly in my thoughts." In this Asaph changes his tone from "I" to "We," realizing that God accomplished incredible things to bring him to where he currently stood, and did so in the lives of people who paved the way for Asaph's very existence.

This brief insight of the human struggle reminds us to live in faith and gratitude, remember that there are those who have come before, and there is--somber as any current circumstance might seem--an invincible and benevolent Almighty Sovereign Creator who desires all created beings to live inspired, to share inspiration, and to persistently be mindful of the magnificence to which each of us has been created. Let us each day move our perspective from "I" to "We", and there we together will inspire one another.

"It is enough to inspire the person next to you, for if we all do that, the whole world will learn to live inspired" The Grateful Pa