Appreciate the Moments
Since childhood, I have always been ambitious. I was taught to shoot for the stars and then when you reach them, shoot for the galaxy. My goals are never-ending. I’m constantly striving to achieve the next thing. I remember in one of my therapy sessions after I moved, my therapist told me to just appreciate the moment I was in and to enjoy it. I can’t remember exactly at what moment, but I realized that although it didn’t look the way I thought it would look, I was living out a prayer I had been praying since college, maybe even before then. I was an adult, standing on my own two feet on the foundation of God. My car and car insurance was in my name. My apartment was in my name. I was making the kind of money I dreamed about 5+ years ago.
I think when we say and hear, “God answers prayers,” we think of those immediate, hard-to-miss moments, like praying for a certain job or praying that a bill can get paid. We don’t realize or, sometimes, we forget that some prayers take time; they need to marinate. For some prayers God takes us through different lessons and different seasons to cultivate us to receive our answered prayers, but during the journey, we forget all about the first set of prayers and begin to focus on new ones. The first set of prayers silently assimilate itself into being our reality and as a result, we begin praying for the next stage of our lives without appreciating the first set of blessings.
I like to collect my older writings – journals, notes, documents, etc. – and the reason why is because it helps me to remember my old mindset. It reminds me of my prayers, whether they were explicitly written or not. Recently, God has allowed me to find two different notes of goals I made years ago in two different periods. One was created around 2018 and the other in 2020. As I reviewed the goals, I realized that God answered most of them! Even goals I made that I forgot about has become a reality for me.
