I just finished reading Looking for Mary by Beverly Donofrio. In it, the author talks about the way she has been conditioned to look at life, as the “daughter of a mother who believed that the world was so untrustworthy that even the weather had it in for her” and the granddaughter of a woman who “was incapable of appreciating the good that surrounded her.” Ultimately, she begins to realize the truth of something she hears in a talk given by a priest during her pilgrimage to Medjugorje:
“All conflict begins at the same moment, when I become blind to what I have and see what I don’t. We are conditioned to believe we need more to be happy. It’s not bad to have more. It’s bad when you do not see what you have.”
It is always our choice whether to notice what we have or notice what we don’t have….whether to be grateful for the gifts we have been blessed with or unhappy because of the things that have been denied to us. To use an example Donofrio uses in the book, if I wake up in the morning and the sun is not shining and the wind is howling such that I can’t do what I planned for the day, it is my choice whether to stomp around in unhappiness or to “watch the rain dribble down my window glass and think, ‘Wonderful; I can snuggle in and read a book.'”
What will we choose to see today?
Creo en Dios! 