March 1 Home Communicator – Being Truly and Deeply Grateful
I frequently use the word grateful. I hear others use it often as well. During this Lenten season, grateful seems to be an excellent word on which to reflect. What does is mean to be grateful? Does this word mean something different to us as Christians? How do we become/remain truly and deeply grateful? Does it come naturally or do we need to work at being grateful?
The dictionary defines grateful as follows:
Grateful (adjective)
- Appreciative of benefits received, thankful.
- Expressing or actuated by gratitude.
- Affording pleasure or comfort, agreeable.
Is this definition accurate when reflecting on what it means for us as Christian to be grateful? Henri Nouwen writes about gratitude and describes it as ‘spiritual work’. (By the way, if you haven’t read any of Henri Nouwen’s writings, I would highly recommend them.) This is what he says about being grateful:
“To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives-the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections-that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.
Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.”
Excerpt from Nouwen, Henri. The Spiritual Work of Gratitude. January 12, 2016. Henry Nouwen Society. Web. 2/23/16
Please join me these next few weeks, and hopefully thereafter, working to be truly and deeply grateful. Regardless of personal circumstances, we can be grateful how much God loves us.
“ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,
that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:16 NIV
Gratefully Serving Him,
Mary Broene, Middle School Principal
