Thankfulness is a lethal weapon of unimaginable power. And because it is, it allows us to rise far above all of the dark and maniacal forces that assail us. And in refusing to lower ourselves to the squalid terrain from which these forces have launched their sordid attacks they are doomed to surrender, not because we outwitted them in battle, but because we stole the battle.

We will never rise on the wings of our own ingenuity or wisdom, for those are the things that lift nothing other than our ego in the process of crashing our lives. Rather, it is the surrender of the smallness of self to the enormity of God that allows us to soar.

Only God understands how incredibly far we’ve fallen, and only God understands how incredibly far we can rise. And only we can determine if we’re going to wallow in the mediocrity that is born of the refusal to understand either.

At times, life vast beyond our understanding careens and then collides headlong with the scrawny limitations of our understanding in an all-out brawl that will dictate whether we stay stunted or whether we rise liberated.