August Advent, part 4: A Grand Gratitude

On days like today, when I flail about in the uncertainty and waiting, I need to go to gratitude to keep my head (and heart) above water.

I also find that offering gratitude on a much bigger scale than I usually do buoys me in better ways. It’s not that I’m ungrateful or forget to give thanks, yet my typical gratitude reaches bread and breath, sun and stars, my life and wife and kids, felt friendships, etc.

As I began thinking about a grand gratitude, I started offering thanks for places in the world I’ve never been and for people I only know tangentially through other people or news stories, which then led to people and places I only vaguely know or may not ever know.

A Grand Gratitude draws the circle of thanksgiving ever-wider, and it helps remind me that my life occurs amidst a much bigger story than I can comprehend. Yet rather than making me feel distant and insignificant, this practice of gratitude makes me feel intricately connected to life all around me.

This practice of A Grand Gratitude stretches my imagination and cultivates a creativity of thinking. I wander down previously unexplored connections among people, places, and things.

I feel this practice helps to put my restlessness and our waiting in perspective.

When practiced well, having A Grand Gratitude helps me breathe, calm down, and demonstrate more patience with myself and others.

On days like today, though, I need to remember this practice, because I feel I ran out of patience and perspective at 8AM - and we still have the whole day to go.

And as I type that I remember the beginning of a prayer offered in a meeting many years ago. Far from a perfunctory proceeding before church-y people meet, this person embraced this opportunity to pray as a way to re-focus the participants and invite God to speak and us to listen.

It begin something like: “Great God of Light, we haven’t seen this day before. We may have seen similar ones, or woke up with similar feelings, but this is a new day, and you can do a new thing in us and in our world today…”

Likewise, we haven’t seen the end of this day before…

“Great God of Light, we haven’t seen the end of this day before, yet we have experienced your faithfulness time and time again. Forgive my impatience. Help me to trust. Help me to be kind. Help me to offer grace. Help me to see that you can make all things new - and that the impatience and flailing that marked my early hours will not mark the rest of this day. For your Glory, and in your holy name. Amen.”