Gratitude is an entry-level spiritual discipline. Anyone can start without waiting for a shiny, perfect life.

Gratitude helps me to pay attention to God’s gifts. Today, my houseplants (and Bernard of Clairvaux) remind me to be grateful for gifts of food, sunlight and air. What are you grateful for today?

Frederik Buechner’s wisdom applied to generosity. Where do your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet? What kind of giving inspires joy? What does the world need?

What are you grateful for? Do you have difficulty feeling grateful? That seems normal. The lyricist doesn’t tell us to tough it out or march onwards regardless of our pain. He suggests hitting pause…. I wonder if gratitude requires listening for God’s whispers of hope and listening means slowing down. Slow gratitude.

Here is a bit of encouragement for those who are working so hard at year-end to make sure their ministries, churches, organizations, and causes have the resources they need to continue making a difference. Thank you.

Most of our petty complaints are silly. I’m not talking here about lament when like Job we despair about suffering and loss. I’m talking daily small irritations: your partner interrupted you. You chose the wrong line at the grocery store.

Choosing to laugh about our petty complaints helps inject gratitude back into the situation

Quietly worshipful and noisily grateful. That's the people's response to Jesus' miracle of raising the widow's son back to life. What does it mean for a church to be quietly worshipful and noisily grateful?

My gratitude teacher called me today. She lives in a group home, where she is recovering from COVID-19, an outbreak that infected her housemates also, leaving one dead. It’s a grim situation. Lament and gratitude aren’t mutually exclusive though.