A guest post: What's good?

This post is from Anna-Lena Hathaway. She is a thinker, activist and blogger. She just graduated from Marist College and is currently based in Berlin. She carries a German and US-American passport. Check out her blog https://frauenderwelt.wordpress.com


What's good?

I was recently reminded of a greeting that one of my friends and I use. It started once when he asked me, “what’s good with you?” At the time, I didn’t understand the question. I asked him, do you mean to ask “How am I?” He said “No, I want to know what’s good with you?” I thought about the question for a moment and began to tell him the good things in my life. After a while, the question was shortened to “what’s good?” which changed the answer to not only include the good in our own lives, but the good we could see in the world.
 
I had not talked to this friend for quite sometime, when he messaged me asking “what’s good?” I was so grateful for the timing of his message because I had been so focused on trying to figure out my next steps that I was forgetting about the present. Before responding, I sat down and created a list of things that were good and things I was grateful for, something I could have done sooner, of course. I came up with quite a long list. I am grateful for this greeting my friend and I share because it allows both of us to only focus on the good things, instead of attempting to evaluate how we are doing.

The Bible starts out with good.  “Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!” (Genesis 1:31, New Living Translation).  In Genesis, God is so pleased with creation that He/She states that it is very good. Sometimes with our daily activities or the negative news reports, it is easy to forget the good things. But this good is always present and we need to recognize it. This is vital, I can see this now. Trusting that we are always taken care of and recognizing the “good already received”, as Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science&Health with Key to the Scriptures an page 3. „The good already received!“ Wow!

Anna-Lena Hathaway - in the middle of Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin