The grass was turning brown, for it had not rained for many days. As the lightning began to flash and the thunder rumbled, I sat on the front porch and watched and prayed. When I said, “God, if you see fit to let a few drops fall, I will be grateful, but if not, thank you for the thunder and lightning,” it began to rain. I am not implying that my prayer had anything to do with that, but it did have to do with the title of this article as well as some of the thoughts that came to shame me.
We have sung many times, “There shall be showers of blessings. Showers of blessings we need. Mercy drops round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.” The thought struck me with force: We have had showers of blessings all of our lives and have in blind ingratitude only thought of them as “mercy drops,” always wanting more, but not properly grateful for what we have. I sat there with tears in my eyes. Perhaps tears of gratitude for God sending the rain, but also probably tears of shame for not being as grateful as I should have been for God’s infinite grace and thinking of the multitude and magnitude of His blessings merely as “mercy drops.”
Not a day passes that I do not thank God for many blessings, but when I examined my heart, I am ashamed to confess that probably many of those expressions of thanks were more than likely mere surface expressions rather than a result of a profound sense of gratitude which would cause me to express that gratitude in deeds of service and homage, rather than in mere words. I have little doubt that I have often more or less taken for granted the fact that God in His grace allowed me to have a precious wife for more than 54 years, everything I needed to sustain life and make it happy, and indeed God has already blessed me exceedingly abundantly above all that I could ask or think. Yet, I have sung, and probably meant, “Mercy drops round us are falling, but for the showers we plead,” as if these blessings were but a small portion of what I deserved or wanted. If we are really grateful, let us act like it, not merely say, “Thanks.”
