Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
--Melodie Beattie
I don't know where you find this stuff, but I must say you have an innate gift for finding uplifting, positive, heart-filled sayings and the pictures to go along with them. They are just so true, so useful, so spiritually right.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
In Chile there was a great woman, Violeta Parra. She wrote a song: "Thanks to Life" but in the end she committed suicide.
ReplyDeleteI believe that gratitude is just only for God
It is gratitude that I feel toward you for posting this.
ReplyDeleteI have mixed feelings about this post. I believe in gratitude. Yes. But, Melodie Beattie is not exactly a good example of a Christian. I have read her books and she is a new-ager. Yes. These words are significant, but I'm not sure if we should be embracing the words that Melodie Beattie speaks.
ReplyDeleteIn defense of Kindred Spirit's choice, I never heard of Melodie Beattie, and who knows how many other readers never heard of her.
ReplyDeleteBut these words, in this context, are beautiful and useful. Yes, we should be grateful to God, first and foremost, but we should be grateful to his instruments, especially other people.
God always works through others, through circumstances, through the lesser creatures. He is very hierarchical by choice in his dealings with his creatures.
So, he sent an angel to Mary. He sent his son through a woman. He speaks to us through a woman. He acts in our lives through angels. He teaches us through the church. Rarely does God deal with us absolutely directly, nearly always through a mediator of some sort, Christ being the primary mediator.
So, we show gratitude to God through gratitude to his mediating creatures. That being said, there is good everywhere, and we should gratefully accept good where we find it. God teaches us infallibly through the ministry of the church, but he also leads and teaches us through other fallible means, even through otherwise misguided new-agers or what have you.
I think a Christian has to prudently sift through what he finds in life, and keep the good and throw out the bad. In THIS case, we can learn from Melodie despite her other errors, because in THIS case, she got it right on the nose.
Gratitude does change things, and as I read somewhere else what a Saint wrote, gratitude is probably the most lacking of the virtues that we owe by justice to God and to our other "benefactors."
And I am grateful to Kindred Spirit for sharing this with us, even if the writer doesn't embrace the fullness of Christian truth.