Go Ahead and Enjoy Life

Ecclesiastes 3v12-13 is the Lent verse for today:

I’ve decided that there’s nothing better to do than go ahead and have a good time and get the most we can out of life. That’s it—eat, drink, and make the most of your job. It’s God’s gift.

(Again, a bit of a quibble with this - I'd prefer the word "work" instead of "job", oh well.)

The longer I know God, the more I feel sure that what he most wants for us is to enjoy the life he has given us, and to be grateful for it. Ecclesiastes winds up in the last chapter telling us to honour and enjoy our Creator. 

In the Catholic mass, there is this prayer (translated from the Portuguese):
Priest - Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People - It is our duty, it is our salvation.
Priest - ... it is truly our duty, it is our salvation, to give you thanks always and every place...

And then, there's the Jerusalem Talmud that tells us we'll be held to account for all the (legitimate) pleasures we could have enjoyed and blessed God for, and didn't.

So - it was such a beautiful day, Mike and I stopped work for a while this morning to go for a walk and discovered that "our" walk has had the waist high nettles cut, it was such a pleasure to walk between the olive trees and stone walls, and see our gate from a new perspective.

Gratefuls:
- this blowy, sunny, perfect day, and more and more flowers everywhere
- going to Évora with Ermelinda and chatting all the way
- her and Cecílio coming here for leek and potato soup and Mike's bread