There’s a moment I love when you first get over a cold.  You have enthusiasm, energy, excitement.  You’re just happy to be able to breath.  You walk around appreciating that you can do it pain free.  And the fact that you can smell dirty laundry makes you happy.  Or is that just me?

But after a few hours, a few days, that changes.  We begin to take everything for granted.  We forget what it was like to be miserable.  We can’t remember how much it hurt just to talk or move.  We tell ourselves, “it wasn’t really that bad…” 

For many of us, that’s how our relationships work with God. 

He comes in, does something amazing and within a few days, a few hours, we’re back to our “normal” selves.  We forget the miracles.  We forget how he changes our lives.  We even forget that he was the cause for it all.  We find ourselves back into our old habits as if we never experienced something amazing.

Most people who believe in God have have experienced this.  As humans we seem to easily forget who helped us, and attribute it to our own efforts.  Maybe there isn’t any way to stop it.  Maybe it’s just part of our fallen nature.  Maybe when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we gained an understanding of evil, but lost the better parts of our memory. 

To be honest, I don’t know why we do this.  I can just make guesses.  And I don’t know how to stop it.  But I do know I don’t want to lose my sense of gratitude.  I don’t want to re-learn lessons that took suffering to learn in the first place.  I want my mind to latch onto God and never let go.  I never want to take him for granted.  Yet why is it so easy to forget?  How do we keep that sense of gratitude?

Maybe that’s just part of the struggle.  Maybe the only thing we can do is to wake up every morning and say, “today I am going to remember.”  Maybe what God wants most is that we give it everything we have, and if we fail, that’s ok, he’s there to pick up the slack.  Maybe living out a life of faith is more about honestly trying than succeeding.

And maybe it’s through that struggle that we’re changed, allowing us to remember what God has done for us.