Embracing Gratitude: A Path to Abundance and Joy

we need gratitude it is not extra credit it is not incidental it is commanded very often in the Bible but here's what I want to say today as we're going through the Gratitude Challenge and today we begin to actually practice gratitude gratitude is something that must be learned gratitude is a skill that we actually acquire [00:01:27]

if you try to raise a grateful Child by just giving them whatever they want all the time it will not work too well in fact we must be brought up to be grateful Margaret Visser has written a wonderful book The Gift of thanks and she talks about precisely this point [00:02:00]

gratitude must be learned and it involves both perception I must come to recognize this is a situation in which gratitude is due is appropriate fits and then not only must I perceive it but I must learn to express it and it often seems quite awkward to us to say thank you to God and possibly to other people [00:03:32]

so we are learning now this is the Gratitude challenge it's not the Gratitude study it's not gratitude Reflections we're not trying to learn about gratitude I want to become a more grateful person it is good so today we begin if you want to the process of gratitude journaling [00:04:27]

Robert Emmons who is the leading research Guru on gratitude in our day at UC Davis did what was kind of the landmark study of um the power of journaling about granted just writing down what am I grateful for and today the exercise will be to write down three blessings three gifts [00:05:07]

remarkably she told me she tried to list each blessing only once and that forced her to be very specific and detailed for example being grateful that I did not grind up any spoons in the garbage disposal today then he goes on to say there's heard from another woman in West Virginia who had a list with more than 23 000 entrees [00:06:09]

neither of these individuals had particularly easy lives nor did writing come easily or naturally for them Jane confided she had suffered from gratitude fatigue hundreds of times and we will talk some about the dynamic of gratitude fatigue because gratitude must be learned and so we'll have to press through that [00:06:33]

gratitude is always important it may come most easily when good things come into our lives but actually it's probably the most important when we're facing difficulty challenges setbacks obstacles failure and pain [00:07:29]

Emmons writes that when when people would journaling this in the initial study that he did which by the way in a prolific career is the single most cited study he has ever done people that kept a gratitude Journal that actually just did it 10 times we're going to do it a bit more but they did it once a week [00:08:06]

and a wide range of experiences could spark gratitude cherished interactions awareness of physical health overcoming obstacles simply being alive some of the specific blessed blessings listed were that my in-laws live only 10 minutes away the warmth of sun on my skin the doctor removed wax from my ear [00:08:39]

so what are those blessings and the idea now is that um savoring them thanking God for them will help open my eyes to be more aware of blessings through the day so that I can learn to be grateful so that I might overflow with generosity and love for others and life might be a gift and not a burden [00:10:25]

we have a lot to be grateful for [00:10:51]