The temptation we have is that of treating all this [thinking about God's gifts] as a zero-sum game, assuming that any time spent on the gifts is necessarily time away from the Giver. But though this sometimes happens, it does not need to happen.
Rightly handled, a gift is never detached from the one who gave it. Wrongly handled, a gift can be the occasion of selfishness, which is a common problem. But it can also be the occasion of a higher form of selfishness, one which pretends to be above the whole tawdry field of "gifts in themselves".
Picture a particularly "pious" little child who as impossible to give gifts to, because he would always unwrap it, abandon it immediately, and run up to his parent and say, "But what really counts in my relationship with you!" A selfish child playing with a toy ungratefully is forgetting the giver. This pious form of selfishness is refusing to let the giver even be a giver...
When we think about the gifts in exclusion of the Giver, it is because we are being prideful, or selfish in some way. If we think about the Giver only, we are trying hard to be disembodied spirits - which is not how the Giver made us, and if we were paying all that much attention to the Giver, we ought to have noticed that He didn't want to make us that way.
If I turn every gift that God gives over in my hands suspiciously, looking for the idol trap, then I am not rejoicing before Him the way I ought to be.
- Douglas Wilson, A Full Tank of Gas and Lots of Wyoming Ahead
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