Gratitude is a key motive for Christian morality, and thus any Christian way of living. God did everything to show love for me, so I want to do right by people, I want to live the kind of life that God would be happy about. A growing proportion of us have little idea of what gratitude really means. Saying "thank you" is too often a way of being polite, not a way of being. They want to think of themselves as being in control, as the one who makes their life tick. But tonight your soul may be required of you. And if it isn't, it may well be because God wanted to give you another day to remember all the things God and other people did for you along the way. An attitude of gratitude naturally leads to love, and repayment by acts of love. Being grateful to God leads to acts which, whatever else they may be, are acts of worship praise!. There are many whom each of us have every reason to be grateful for; the challenge is to treat them accordingly.
The link between grace and gratitude runs like this: someone does a beneficial or helpful action that is beyond what was merited or expected (grace). Then someone responds by seeking to act in kind (gratitude). Gratitude flows from understanding how each of us is dependent on what others do, and treasuring each action of grace for all it's worth.
What do you do with a debt of gratitude? You pay it back to the person(s) who showed grace to you. Then, you pay it forward, to someone else who could use some grace right now. Namely, each and all of us.
Gratitude Quotes
"Gratitude is a virtue of the highest excellence, as it implies a feeling and generous heart, and a proper sense of responsibility."
Noah Webster
"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"
G.K. Chesterton
"To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference."
Thomas Merton
"In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, *Letters and Papers from Prison*
"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."
William Arthur Ward
"Capitalism encourages us to see human beings as self-interested, utility-maximizing creatures. But people with grateful dispositions are attuned to the gift economy where people are motivated by sympathy as well as self-interest. In the gift economy intention matters. We’re grateful to people who tried to do us favors even when those favors didn’t work out. In the gift economy imaginative empathy matters. We’re grateful because some people showed they care about us more than we thought they did. We’re grateful when others took an imaginative leap and put themselves in our mind, even with no benefit to themselves."
David Brooks, "The Structure of Gratitude", NY Times, July 28 2015, p.A23
Go ahead. Show the dictionary some gratitude.
Read this on grace and gratitude, from Ann Voskamp.
A Spirithome Dare: Go throughout tomorrow thanking each person who helps you or serves you. Every single one of them. From wake-up to bedtime. From lovers to strangers to enemies. No matter how small the deed is. At day's end, look back on it. What did it cause? What did you feel? What was their reaction?
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