Sometimes gratitude can sound like a platitude, a polite reflex rather than a felt response. We hear or read “thank you” without the earnest gratefulness it is meant to carry. Maybe that is the result of a hurried, demanding world, or of being told to “be grateful” when our heads are crowded, and our hearts are heavy with grief.
Right now, gratitude and grief feel tightly entangled—within our personal lives and as we witness the fraying of values on the global stage. The relentless news cycle amplifies our anxieties; fear for loved ones and neighbors deepens; leaving us shaken and distant from life’s calm, sweet, precious moments. We cannot honestly be grateful for everything, and we do not have to pretend otherwise. We can, however, bravely choose gratefulness in the hardest moments.
A line from Matt de la Peña’s The Last Stop on Market Street captures this for me: “Sometimes when you’re surrounded by dirt… you’re a better witness for what’s beautiful.” Read during a Sunday service last month, it landed like a quiet instruction: grief can crush us and, at the same time, saturate us with a heart aching appreciation for life’s small, profound gifts.
Sustaining gratitude is not mere sentiment or social performance. It is a chosen spiritual practice that asks us to see, even amid sorrow, the presence of beauty and the gift of being alive. Gratitude that endures is a spiritual practice that allows sorrow and appreciation to coexist, fortifying the heart when distress arrives and is all-encompassing.
I am grateful to all of you who continually create our First Church community of care and love, filled with the best of intentions, good trouble and such sweetness it breaks my heart open on the regular. There is an exhaustive list of ways each of you show up to be present and center love that makes First Church magic. It is more than a place; it is a sanctuary of people.
May we return to gratitude and discover some of life’s sweetness on our paths each day.
Rev. Kimberlee Tomczak Carlson
Minister of Faith Formation