See "Sunday Confessions" post here.
But--her journal entry yesterday was the final confirmation that I needed to believe that she's not suggesting a vague-Polly-Anna-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life-stop-and-smell-the-roses type of gratitude.
Listing one thousand gifts is not a mystical formula for ensuring some sort of temporal outcome.
Gratitude in all circumstances means letting God do a huge work of transformation. It also means truly believing that God is good at all times. Even when life swells with painful loss...
It's facing the scary thought that before one's own list is finished, it may mean thanking God for something that crushes your heart under the weight of the grief.
Ann wrote this yesterday:
"Counting one thousand gifts is to live the radical thanks of Christ. It’s about an exercise in the age to come coming now and finding comfort in the Comforter. It’s the culture of believers really believing, the culture of God and the Blood of the Lamb.
This world doesn’t need trendy gratitude like it needs Jesus gratitude. The kind that gives thanks for the bread and the nails, for the fire that refines and the blood that saves.
That gives thanks in the pitch and the thunder, the wind and Gethsemane black, that gives thanks even staring into the face of death because it sees His face in all things, because it fiercely believes in relentless Grace and the Hound of Heaven who can’t stop pursuing in Love.
That doesn’t give nebulous thanks to the universe, but named thanks to the King of the Universe, the Giver of All, to Him who is the only Gift, for from Him and to Him and through Him are all things."
This is the kind of "give thanks at all times" that I want...
And so begins my list of 1000 Gifts:
1. God--who isn't safe, but good.
