My human owner has to change my water pot every day, or else it ends up as “parrot soup.” I like to drop tasty morsels into it to soften them up, but then I go away and forget about them.
I’ve only become this casual about my food because I’ve never had to worry about it. Thanks to my human owner, food simply appears in my food pot, rather like “manna from Heaven.” Unlike my feathered friends outside, I don’t have to search for it, (although I do go on illegal forays to the fruit bowl).
I’m ashamed to admit that this situation has made me rather wasteful. It seems that the more we have of something, the more we can take it for granted. And that not only applies to food, but also to friendships, our health, our work, our close relationships, our standard of living, and even to having a roof over our heads. In fact, it’s all too easy for us to take our entire existence for granted. And in the long-term, that won’t bring us joy or happiness.
Even if we have very little in our lives, we can make ourselves feel an awful lot better by being “thankful.” By being thankful for every single thing that makes our lives more comfortable, more enjoyable and more secure.
Thoughtfulness often goes together with thankfulness; we all need to stop and think about how much we really have in our lives. And hopefully, Jesus will feature somewhere in the list of things. And that’s why, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes that they should be “…overflowing with thankfulness.” (Colossians 2:7)
