She begins by making a list of gifts, many are just normal everyday things, but they are noticed...."maybe I don't even know they are gifts really until I write them down and that is really what they look like. Gifts He bestows. This writing down-it is sort of like....unwrapping love." She writes one thousand and at the end of the day...."Well, if all these were gifts that God gives-then wasn't my writing down the list like....receiving. Like taking with thanks."
She reads in Philippians 4 that Paul learned to be content, learned. She realized she would have to learn to give thanks in all circumstances and the list could maybe teach her that over time...learn to be thankful no matter what...She also realizes that to name calls it into existence, recognizing it as a gift from God. "In naming which is right before me, that which I'd otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible."
I get this...the noticing. The other day, I saw a woman sitting on a bench, I have seen her once before I believe she lives in a house by the ocean. I wonder about her, the lost husband maybe she once walked with on this road as they stared at the waves together. Later, I notice the man on another bench this time across from the post office, I am walking out and our eyes meet for a moment and I smile. He has time to sit on a bench, at one time, he was bustling about. We all have a life, a story to tell. I don't want to pass these by, they seem important and they seem tied into the idea of giving thanks. I think noticing is the first step in thanks and then we must say, thank you, for whatever it is in that noticing.
Ann feels the list of thanks ushers her into God's love for her and that is where change happens, in His love. Thanksgiving brought her to this place. (of course reading her book offers much more but I hope to capture a bit of her words....)
She quotes Julian of Norwich:"This highest form of prayer is to the goodness of God...God only desires that our soul cling to him with all of its strength, in particular, that it clings to his goodness. For of all the things our minds can think about God, it is thinking upon his goodness that pleases him most and brings the most profit to our soul."
She continues, "This gift list is thinking upon His goodness-and this, this pleases him the most! And most profits my sown soul and I am beginning, only beginning to know it. If clinging to His goodness is the highest form of prayer, then this seeing His goodness with a pen, with a shutter, with a word of thanks, these really are the most sacred acts conceivable. The ones anyone can conceive, anywhere, in the midst of anything. Eucharisteo takes us into His love...the only way to be a woman of prayer is to be a woman of thanks....life change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.
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