Psalm 16:1-7
Are You Blessed?

Keep me safe, O God,
     for in you I take refuge.

I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord;
     apart from you I have no good thing."

As for the saints who are in the land,
     they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

The sorrows of those will increase
     who run after other gods.
I will not pour out their libations of blood
     or take up their names on my lips.

LORD, you have assigned me my portion and my cup;
     you have made my lot secure.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
     surely I have a delightful inheritance.

I will praise the LORD, who counsels me;
     even at night my heart instructs me.

New International Version

We live most of our lives in an "in-between" condition, where we have struggles and difficulties, and we also have joys and blessings. Very rarely are our circumstances completely desperate, just like very rarely are we in a state of incredible bliss. In short, most of the time, we live with the choice of whether our metaphorical glass is "half-full" or "half-empty".

Now, many of you who regularly read my meditations will find the above premise absurd! The Creator loves you enough to have sent Jesus to be your Savior and the Holy Spirit to live in you! In comparison to God's blessings, how could your "glass" be anything but overflowing? You who consistently view life in this way are a joy and an inspiration to me, for you make the choice, minute by minute, to grasp tightly that divinely-inspired attitude about life.

Still, it is our choice. We have people all around us who choose to see their glass as half-empty, no matter how they have been blessed. Some of you, like me, have such an unsettled nature to our personalities that we can't put aside what isn't right. When that nature shows in empathy for the poor, the disrupted, the sick, and the lonely, it can reflect Jesus' nature as He reached out in love to the ignored and rejected of His time. But my unsettled nature rarely lets me feel contented, and my logic eats through my blissful emotions far too quickly.

But my choice remains the same! I don't need an ecstatic mood to overwhelm my ability to think--it is my logical imperative to choose to recognize and focus my attention on God's blessings, rather than to obsess on what is missing, flawed, or broken in my life.

The same choice is available to those for whom the pressures and difficulties of life have emotionally flooded them. It is a brutally difficult decision to choose to think on the positive in the throes of depression, and I pray for an abundance of friends and skilled helpers for those who are fighting off clouds of despair. When asked, many of those who have come through that darkness in their lives can tell you of a moment where they embraced the reality that they did indeed have a choice to focus on the half-full rather than the half-empty.

I find one of the themes of this psalm of David is that choice to pay close attention to his blessings. David doesn't praise God in this psalm for the abundance of his feasts, the vastness of his empire, or the quantity of his possessions. Instead, David is grateful that God has provided his portion in life. Rather than fret that the boundaries of his land are limited, David rejoices in what is contained in the boundaries. With God's help, he defies the old adage that "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" and finds delight in the half-full.

David lets us know that he was achieving this state of gratefulness only because of God's transforming power in teaching him how to live. Gratefulness didn't result from abundance, because what satisfies our greed in one moment will not be enough in the next moment. His gratefulness didn't result from emotions either, for the word the NIV translated as "heart" is translated as "mind" in the NASB translation and "reins" in the KJV. It was not the seat of David's emotions that guided him, but the core of his being that God had oriented to follow after the Way.

You wonderful saints that I mentioned above know this to be true! You live with a joy in the core of your being that is not something ephemeral like an emotion. Instead, it is a sprouted seed of what you are becoming; it is a gyroscope set by God to maintain your direction; it is a longing pulling at you when you occasionally slip and start to ponder the empty portion of your glass. You know the choice to focus on God's blessings becomes easier the more you practice it, but you know it will always remain your choice.

Are you blessed? Of course you are. The more important question is this: as you live, do you remember that you are blessed?