How privileged you are....

"How privileged you are to see what you have seen."  This is the quote that sprang to my heart during a bible reading today.  How deeply I felt this line to be true.  I have seen such beauty and wonder in the world.  Certainly I see it in nature and in all that surrounds me.  If you live in a place as wild and majestic as Alaska you cannot miss it.  (Well, maybe you can, but that's another post.) But, I have also seen great and nearly incomprehensible beauty in the perfection and innocence of a toddler totally blissed out at being able to run away from his laughing parents.  I see people being kind and caring to each other every day, people who believe that the world is a better place when we make eye contact and smile or we let someone go ahead of us in the grocery line.  I see staggering beauty in the constancy of love relationships and the ongoing ups and downs of children growing up and finding their own way in life.  (My kids are 11 and 13 right now and some times when I look at them my knees get weak with the splendor of their becoming.) 

I have people in my life who share with me their deepest thoughts and challenges, their desires to bring about change in this world, and the conviction that they are called to be more loving every single day and I marvel at the miracle of spiritual growth.  Really, it is nothing short of a miracle that we ever wake up enough to see the truth about ourselves, about God in our lives, about the world around us.  I am grateful that we live in a miraculous world!  And then to watch us move forward, not in a sort of New-Year's-Resolution-I will-do-this-better sort of way.  But to move forward effortlessly because a shift has occurred at our deepest level.  Something that we said "yes" to at some point, but now, just is.  No going back because now we are new people.  

The more I experience, the more deeply I see and the more profoundly grateful I become.  Today, my desire and prayer is that I will look deeply and lovingly at whatever comes into my path, be it joy and ease or suffering and pain.  They are all my teachers and all a privilege.