thoughts on a lanyard

As I caught up on my friend Shannon's blog (check it out at http://www.shanltay.typepad.com/) I was struck by this poem by Billy Collins, which I have read somewhere before. I find it profound:

The Lanyard
The other day as I was ricocheting slowlyoff the pale blue walls of this room,bouncing from typewriter to piano,from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,I found myself in the L section of the dictionarywhere my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelistcould send one more suddenly into the past --a past where I sat at a workbench at a campby a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid thin plastic stripsinto a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that's what you did with them,but that did no keep me from crossing strand over stand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,and I gave her a lanyard.She nursed me in many a sickroom,lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, set cold face-cloths on my forehead,and then led me out in the the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.Here are thousands of meals, she said,and here is clothing and a good education.And here is your lanyard, I replied,which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,strong legs, bones and teeth,and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.And here, I wish to say to her now,is a smaller gift -- not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,but the rueful admission that when she tookthe two-tone lanyard from my hands,I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I woveout of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Isn't that true? Surely of mothers (and fathers), but also of God. He gives me a world of glowing sunsets and crashing waves and mountains, a family full of grace and wisdom and tough love, an absurdly healthy body, and a mind capable of appreciating it all, and I say: Here God. I will work in a job that helps the poor for a little while. I'll even tell people that I believe in You. So we're even, right? What more could You possibly want from me?