Give us this day...

"Give us this day our daily bread" is part of a great prayer. It also has secular meaning as well....to remember to live today, to live in the present. I am a huge offender of this. My mind runs 100 miles per hour mostly thinking about tomorrow, or if it's focused on today, it is on "to-do". Certain things that require immediate attention stop this over thinking, forcing me to pay attention to what is happening around me. (Kids are great for this!) It's like a lightening bolt reminder that time doesn't stop just because you're thinking about something you deem important...life goes on.

In the past month, many friends and family members have lost loved ones or found out about some serious illness that someone close has been diagnosed with. 8 people just in the last month that we have learned of their passing and/or disease. It was a real wake up call. It is always unimaginable to think of your own mother, father, sibling, spouse or child being taken away from you...as it should be. However, when it happens to someone you know, you start to take those quiet, "boring" moments and cherish them all the more.

Haven't you ever looked back on a time in your life and said to yourself, "wow, I didn't know how good I had it..." Or maybe you did & took in each moment with a breath of thankfulness, loving just "being" at that point in your life. For many it is the former, because it's so easy to forget that life is not supposed to be perfectly plotted out...it's supposed to be lived. I have noticed that the best times in my own life have been when I am taking care of business as usual, and leaving the rest to God. For you that may be the same, or you might call God The Universe, your Spiritual Guide, your Guardian Angel, etc. For me it's God, and things always seem to strangely turn out exactly as I wanted..perhaps not in the exact way that I had planned.

This week as I spend most of it rocking (read: bouncing!) a baby to sleep, dividing up army men for bickering boys & telling them for the umpteenth time that beds are not trampolines, I hope I can remember to appreciate my "daily bread", both literally and figuratively...because life is a gift.