A blessed and beautiful May to you all!
As I was thinking about my article this month, I was inspired by a recent quote that was used as part of our discussion and learning in Adult Sunday School. Keith Trostle was leading the lesson on the sermon to the Hebrews and he provided us with many wonderful quotes reflecting our need for gratitude directed to God because of our receipt of grace. This one particular quote really caught me:
“To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and education in gratitude” G.K. Chesterton.
Gratitude is gratefulness in the simplest definition. But gratitude, if taken more deeply, is a recognition of God’s presence, action, and love in our lives. It’s an attitude, a posture, a physical way of being. It is a responsive mindset and a prayerful attitude that constantly pervades us. Gratitude is our very view on the world.
And this gratitude that we hold and practice is not because we’re particularly religious or faithful and it’s certainly not from our perfect righteousness. This gratitude comes from our reflection of God’s grace and recognizing that there is no place where God is not and no thing which God hasn’t touched.
When we really stop and think and work to make a gratitude list each day, we find that we are abundantly blessed. I heard this said one time when I was complaining about my legs hurting from a long walk. The person I was walking with responded, “Be grateful you have two working legs which ache from the joy of a walk.”
I was stunned.
Gratitude allows us, as Chesterton points out, to see the grace of God in a bird flying past, weeds, sunsets. Gratitude allows us to look at the creation with new found appreciation and to see the beauty of all things, even rain, snow, and gray days.
Gratitude is a constant search for God because we know that it is only by God’s grace that we exist. The Apostle Paul notices this in his sermon at the Aeropagus recorded in Acts 17: “26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:26-28).
When we stop and reflect on all things we can be grateful for, we realize there are many things, many blessings, many places, people, and things. If we focus our minds purely on the negative, this is all we will see. But if we can step back for a moment and look objectively at our lives, we begin to see the abundance of things for which we should be grateful and the eyedropper of things for which we are caused frustration.
It is my prayer that we will all embrace the beauty of God’s good earth and that we will see the things in a different light. As the light lengthens the day and as the days get warmer and more beautiful, look deeply around you and seek to find all things for which gratefulness is the only worshipful response