A Blessing For · Gratitude

A Grateful Heart

Little Lamb in her blue pinafore setting a small glass jar of wildflowers down on a sunlit stone windowsill

“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus toward you.”

1 Thessalonians 5:18

In everything give thanks. In it, not for it — one small word, and it carries the whole difference. God has never asked anyone to be grateful for the loss, the diagnosis, the empty chair. He asks something gentler and harder — that even standing in the middle of it, you would still be able to find one thing that is good, and say so.

Pretending is exhausting, and God has no use for it. Gratitude is something else — a discipline of attention: the deliberate act of looking away from the one thing that is wrong long enough to see the many that are not.

It does something to the person who practises it. A grateful heart is not a heart with fewer problems. It is a heart that has stopped letting its problems do all the talking.

Name one good thing today. Out loud, if you can. Then name a second. You will find the second one comes more easily than the first, and that is the whole secret.

A Prayer for Today

Lord, thank You for what I so easily walk past. Teach me to notice. Teach me to say it. Amen.

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