It's easy to take things for granted

About 2 weeks ago I was working on a project and in deep thought. I rested my arm on my desk and compressed my ulnar nerve. The ulnar nerve is the one we often call the funny bone - it's that annoying spot on the end of your elbow that makes your arm tingle when you hit it.

When you compress this nerve, it causes the outside of your palm from the tip of your pinky finger to your wrist to become numb as well as the tip of your ring finger. These are two parts of your hand that you really tend to take for granted and don't realize how much they get used until you have this constant numbness there reminding you every time you touch something, or move that something is wrong.

I took that part of my hand for granted.

Sometimes, we take God for granted. He's constant. He's true to his word. He loves us unconditionally. We think He will always be there, so sometimes we get to a point where we begin to take Him for granted and we begin to treat our relationship with him casually.

In Psalm 137 the People of Israel were in a similar situation. They were in captivity because they took God for granted and drifted away from Him. In a strange land, away from home, they could no longer sing their songs of joy. The psalmist basically proclaims that he would rather have his right hand forget how to work than to not be in the place where God wants them to be.

Let us struggle to not take our relationship with God for granted. Let's find that enthusiasm we had when we first obtained this great salvation and keep pressing forward!

By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion.
² On the willows there
    we hung up our lyres.
³ For there our captors
    required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How shall we sing the Lord's song
    in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
    let my right hand forget its skill!
⁶ Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
    above my highest joy! (Psalm 137 1-6)