Have you ever played a game driving where you look for a certain color car? Like you say, “Let’s count all the blue cars.” (this may or may not be something only parents trying to entertain young children can relate to).
When you start looking, suddenly they’re all you see. Try it. Choose a color, and look for it around you. You notice it where you didn’t realize it was before. It’s everywhere, right?
I’ve realized gratitude works the same way.
The Practice of Gratitude
As we come upon Thanksgiving, I wonder if we are struggling to find things to be grateful for. It’s been a wild year. It would be so easy to focus on the negative, on what we lack, on what we’ve missed.
And gratitude is something we often do when we feel like it, or when it’s expected. Like after the giving of a gift, or when someone lends a helping hand. (Are people giving gifts right now? Anybody helping someone else in person?) It’s not something we always think to do.
But I’m also learning that gratitude is something we have to practice. It has to become a liturgy in our lives, something that flows out of us like breath.
And when we do, when we start looking for the good in our lives, we start to see it. We’re training our eyes to see God at work. It’s not that He hasn’t been there all along. We just weren’t seeing it.
This fall our pastor led us through the book of Ruth. There’s a point in the story where the author says, “she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz.” It got us talking about this phrase, “It so happened.” We say it sometimes. But really, does anything just so happen?
Those “it so happened” moments are God. We need to train our eyes to recognize that fact.
Training Our Eyes to See the Good
So when we make a habit of saying “thank you, Jesus,” about the good gifts in our lives, we begin to see that He is at work all around us. We recognize that those “it so happened” moments didn’t just so happen. God never stops doing good to us.
For me, it helps to start at a granular level. I have breath in my lungs today. There’s a roof over my head. I have clothes on my back and food in my belly. Every one of those things is a gift of grace I did not earn or deserve.
When we start there, we see good everywhere. We see it in a timely text from a friend, a blessedly cooler day here in central Florida (it’s November for Pete’s sake!), in satisfying work. It’s our kid getting through another day of online classes, a moment of feeling normal in the middle of a pandemic, seeing a familiar face on a call.
There’s so much we take for granted every day, so many ways God is showing up and giving to us, and our souls are blessed when we acknowledge it. We are reminded that we are not alone-He is with us and He is for us. Always.
God’s goodness is the blue car we can see everywhere if we train our eyes to look.
