Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

I am thankful to God for the grace of being alive.

I am a Christian because of God's grace. I find it in no other faith system. The Christian gospel is rather simple. I love the way Tim Keller puts it: "I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me." The result is that I neither swagger nor snivel; I live with thanksgiving, overwhelmed and overjoyed by grace. This path seems to lead us to a place of needing to be noticed less often, and being less concerned with how we're thought of.

When thanksgiving is filled with true meaning and is not just the formality of a polite __hank you,_ it is the recognition of dependence.

We should not let a day go by without thanking God for His mercy and grace to us in Jesus Christ.

Thanksgiving is recognition of a debt that cannot be paid. We express thanks, whether or not we are able otherwise to reimburse the giver.