BEING GRATEFUL

We all have so much for which we should be thankful, so very, very much. Perhaps so much so that we do not realize just have blessed we really are. One of the reasons, I suspect, that we fail to grasp our blessedness is that often we find ourselves comparing our blessings with those who we deem to be more blessed than we are instead of those who are obviously so much less blessed than we are.

Doing so may be human nature. It may also be the product of the world in which we now live and especially in this great country of ours. We are blessed to live in this country and because of that we are so much more blessed than those who live in other parts of this world, parts of the world sociologists call The Third World or the Three-Fourths World. We take our blessings for granted and only, rarely, if ever, it often seems, pause to give thanks for them.

Truly, because we have so much for which to be thankful, gratitude should be a way of life for us. The word itself, gratitude, comes from the Latin word gratus meaning “thankful”. Gratus is close to gratia which means “grace” – which gives us a clue as to why we should be thankful in the first place, which is why we should never, ever take our blessings for granted.

We are graced people, you and I. We have done nothing to deserve that grace, nothing at all. Why we are so graced and why so many others are not is something we can neither understand nor explain. All we can do, all we should do, is be thankful to God for so gracing us and not, not even once, compare our gifts, our blessings, to those of others or, worse yet, somehow begin to believe we deserve those blessings. We do not.

Gratitude should be like a fuel that gives power to our lives. It should propel us to be the person God created us to be, endowed with the gift’s God graced us with, so that we can become a source of grace and blessing to those who are not so blessed, while not judging them for their lack of blessings but, rather, being thankful that we are so abundantly and undeservedly blessed.

One can only wonder what this world would be like if we, each and every one of us, lived a life of gratitude. Instead of being envious of those we deem more blessed, we would share some of our blessings, some of our time and talents and financial resources, to help bless those who do not have what we have in abundance. Instead of hoarding our blessings, we should share them with those in need. To live more simply so that other may simply live is living a life of gratitude.

Good people that we are, and we are good people, we sometimes can find ourselves not doing what we know deep in our hearts we should be doing. It is so easy to get so caught up in our own little world that we forget about those who are not part of our world. Living a life of gratitude not only makes those with whom we share our blessing more blessed, it make our live even more so. We know that when we have done that. We just need to make gratitude a way of life and not simply an occasional part of it.