I am most thankful for what I don’t have, for had my life’s wish list been filled in the manner I had chosen I would be steeped in meaningless trinkets verses bathed in God’s treasures.

I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the very places where society mistakenly says life stores its scraps. And I am constantly amazed that in the treasure trove that surrounds me, I stand in the company of so few.

I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me.

To ‘stop and smell the roses’ we must first believe that there’s a rose garden out there somewhere. And in this jaded world of ours, the refusal to believe in gardens leaves most of us ref of roses.

The greatest gifts are not the things that please us. Rather, they are the things that grow us. Therefore, we may have gladly received an abundance of possessions, but we may not have accepted a single gift.

In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.

Oh that we might have the wisdom to stop, lean down and pick up the scattering of things that we’ve so thoughtlessly discarded along the way. For if we were to do so, we would suddenly find ourselves holding the very treasures that we’d been looking for all along.

The greatest gifts come in the most tattered wraps.