Being the One ~ Gratitude part 2

 

“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for the present, and creates/cultivates a vision for tomorrow” ~ Melody Beattie

 

This week, we are cultivating and curating a practice of gratitude, thanksgiving, and living with appreciation.  Melody Beattie’s quote invites us to look back with eyes of appreciation.  Rewind and review the last month.  What gratitude stirs and swirls within you?  I am grateful to the staff at Florida State University who hosted the orientation and led sessions that were helpful to us as parents about to drop our son off at college in a few weeks.  I am grateful that we traveled there and back on roads I did not pave and don’t physically maintain.  I give thanks for food that nourishes me, but that I don’t grow.  I give thanks for a church where people listen and seek to embody love for each other.  I give thanks for our staff who share their gifts and shine their lights.  I give thanks for YOU, dear reader!  You faithfully read and comment on these meditations.  I give thanks for my family who inspire and fill my heart with love.  I give thanks for worship on Sunday, conversations, meetings, and holy moments of honoring the lives of our saints.  Suddenly, July looks a little different.

 

This does, as Beattie says, give peace for this present moment.  I know the world today is broken and bruised.  I am not just trying to put frosting on a burnt cake to serve to you.  I am inviting you from dualistic – either/or thinking – where we operate at extremes of best or worst ever!!!!  To a non-dualistic, paradoxical, beautiful tension way of being that can hold lightly the good and bad.  Yes, the war in Ukraine breaks my heart.  Yes, the polarization in our political climate causes pain and the discrimination in our country hurts so many.  Yes, there is so much that we long and want to make better.  And at the same time each day, God is at work bringing forth beauty and repair and inviting me as a collaborator.  As Richard Rohr says, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the good.”  The best way to be light is to shine light, not just keep turning off the light with our cynicism and passing along pain.

 

Which is what Beattie is saying.  You are creating and cultivating tomorrow.  You are writing the future when you think everything is going to you know where in a handbasket OR let your light shine in brave, beautiful, bold ways.  Some won’t like it.  Some trolls on Twitter will try to steal your joy because they have no joy.  You either accept their script to live from, or cling to the gospel script of good news that shows us another way.

 

May gratitude today help you see the good that brought you safe this far, wraps around you this morning, and will lead you throughout this day and this week.  With thanksgiving for YOU, Amen.