A Practical Practice of Gratitude
This Thanksgiving season I’m reminded of how important it is to be surrounded by those who reflect Christ’s love back to you. I aim to carve out some extended moments this week to reflect on what it means to be guided by gratitude, and give thanks for the people in your life who radiate the love of God. The term I learned for this is your “people of peace.”
My “people of peace” act both as anchors to my life and a motivational compass for becoming a better human being. They embody, through example and action, the qualities I find most aspirational. If you want to use a practical example for cultivating gratitude in your life this Thanksgiving, I invite you to identity at least one person of peace. Then, reach out to them and disclose to them their influence on your life, and thank them for it.
A practice I try to own on a daily basis is being guided by a spirit of gratitude. This posture is very difficult to hold at any length without distraction, which is why it also provides consistent moments of humility! But a spirit of gratitude allows me to live honestly in difficult moments by acknowledging the pain, discomfort, and uncertainly, without being consumed by it.
Gratitude has a transformative and refining quality. It reframes moments, memory, experiences, and mindsets by cutting through to what matters most in life. Through a spirit of gratitude, we are forced to recognize the gravitational pull of God’s love and locate the evidence of how that love reveals itself in your life. Gratitude, then, is a practice of both being aware of the divine in your own life and allowing yourself to be transformed by it constantly.
This posture of being surprised by God showing up in your life in real and tangible ways allows us the ability to see God in the lives of everyone we encounter. None of us are uniquely holy, transcendent, or capable vessels of the divine. To be human is to be loved. Our humanity is both the bridge for extending compassion to others and receiving with thankfulness the gift of God’s presence.
May you feel God’s presence this Thanksgiving holiday, may you open yourself up to being surprised by extraordinary moments of divine revelation in the mundane and ordinary, and may you be inspired to act with gracious joy in response to this enduring gift of God’s love.
