I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. Ecclesiastes 3:12-13
“We should consume with gratitude, savoring, and sharing…Gratitude helps extend the range of appreciation to the people and creatures whose labor brought the food to the table…Gratitude in action often leads to savoring, an activity of lingering over and taking delight in our consumption…Both gratitude and savoring imply a certain detachment from the thing itself. To be grateful is to recognize the blessing as a gift that was gratuitously given…and to savor, is paradoxically, also to detach. Though it is attentive to and embraces the created world, savoring brings about a certain spiritual fulfillment that helps humans detach from an idolatry of “stuff” and attend to what really matters…”
Laura M. Hartman in The Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World (Oxford: OUP, 2011) 61-63.
Hartman rightly notes the progression from gratitude to savoring to sharing. Yesterday afternoon Sammy and I fished the Crystal River (pictured above) and caught ten nice fish. Both of us were fortunate to land Master Angler Awards for catching huge Mountain Whitefish. Today we are tying flies at the International Federation of Fly Fishers event at Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs. I am grateful for time with him in God’s creation, and savoring it as a gift from God. Savoring leads to sharing because we find great joy teaching others how to tie flies and catch fish. The best part is that we enjoy doing it together!
This afternoon we will give a presentation on “Native Trout of the United States” at 2pm. If you’ve never watched the trout videos Sammy has produced (and that I help shoot), here’s the most recent one: Owyhee River Basin Redband Trout Fly Fishing. Sammy and I are grateful for each trout we catch. We savor the moments with photos and video, and love to share them with the world. Though we catch a lot of fish, with each one we pause to gratefully savor the “glimpse of God’s extravagance” (as Sammy loves to describe it), and then release it to share the experience with anglers after us.