How Gratitude Can Make You a Better Neighbor

How do I conclude this journey of gratitude when the end is but the mere beginning? How do I put into words the difference it makes to hold as treasures the things given from God’s hand? This week we follow the ripple begun by practicing gratitude out even further to see how it touches our neighborhoods. Because gratitude, it doesn’t touch just one life, it touches many. Live gratitude and it will pull you deeper into God’s embrace. Live gratitude and it will open wider your heart to be a better parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague, and neighbor.

We’ve been practicing how to slow, how to pause long enough to notice, to treasure as gifts the people and things before us. And I’ve felt the pressing into this, this thankfulness for the present moment, lift my gaze. I live best when I lift my gaze and look beyond me—because beyond me is where God is, and God wraps me round in embrace though I don’t always have the eyes to know it. From this vantage place of being near Him I see all better.

This month I’m re-reading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts, and I press the pen light to mark the lines that sink deep. I read this line again and then draw my own line beneath it: “Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention.” Slow time. We are hard-pressed for time, and I am no exception. I can see first the things I need to get done and forget to give thanks for the ones there waiting for my full attention.

I want to be preoccupied with gratitude so I can slow time and treasure well and invite in and open more. I want to live alive in this one life I’ve been given so I can give life.

Gratitude unlocks the heart to love and be loved, give and be given, see and be seen. Gratitude brings me round to open, that word I sat with for a full year, and then more—because a word of the year can change so much you don’t want to let it go with the close of a year. Gratitude unlocks the clasp and I surrender and I open. I let people in—hard for the one who has struggled to let others in close enough to see the beneath, the authentic underneath. And through the journey I discover that the things that push against my grain grow the most fruit.

“I have lived the runner,” writes Ann, “panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.” Perhaps the biggest block to missional living is living closed off. Closed eyes prevent seeing, and I can only value who I can see.

When I welcome open, doesn’t it first begin with the eyes? With the seeing? The noticing? People. How much the same we are. How our differences bring complexity that is delightful and form the grounds of a strong community. Moments. The ones I miss with my eyes closed. The ones I don’t think to create when I remain closed off.

And what is gratitude but an invitation to open my eyes to see and my heart to say “thank you”?

This week we choose to linger in the present moments with eyes open wider. We choose to take notice. We press into seeing through the lens of God’s eyes.

When we look through God’s eyes we begin to see how He delights in each and every one. How His great heart beats for and is moved by people. How deeply He treasures each one. How individually and together we demonstrate His glory. How He creates us to need each other and be better together.

I want seeing eyes. I want to live grateful and open and deeply alive—to love well and live well—to embrace the treasure in the small moments and the people I live near.

Let His presence linger

This morning I read how God’s people are “like lovely sanctuaries of [His] presence” (Psalm 84:1 TPT)! How might it change the way I live, how I give, how I open—if I really took it to heart that I am a sanctuary of God’s presence? That His presence lingers, fragrant as perfume. That anywhere with Him is a safe place, and He is with me wherever I go. 

And the line before that promise? It says that God “[finds] so much beauty in” us—in His people.

Knowing the value God sees in me gives me eyes to see how He values each of us the same—each of us extravagantly. Finding myself in Him leads to His presence lingering like perfume. A lovely sanctuary of His presence!

Lead with humility

In the next chapter I read this:

For I know your power and presence shines on all your lovers. Your glory always hovers over all who bow low before you.”

Psalm 85:9 TPT

This glory-hover, this God-fragrance—it remains with those who bow low. It rests on the humble.

The pure in heart shall see God (Matthew 5:8), and perhaps it is the humble who are purest in heart, who have seeing eyes. The Passion Translation uses these words for the verse:

What bliss you experience when your heart is pure! For then your eyes will open to see more and more of God.

Gratitude opens the eyes to see more God—more, too, through God’s eyes. Perhaps the way of gratitude leads me to a heart that is also pure.

I need the weighty glory of God to hover; I need to be strengthened with His presence and power—because to live on mission I need more of Him and less of me. I need to bow low. To choose humility so I can let the joyful path, the full path, create ripples that reach out beyond me to my neighborhood.

Keep practicing

This gratitude-infused journey, it’s really an invitation to keep practicing, to keep seeing how gratitude will keep the heart and eyes open. Taste joy and it stirs a holy restlessness to know more—not an anxious darting of the eyes to seek that which fulfills, but the peace of knowing that the good God gives, there is always more.

Gratitude postures me to see the good from God’s hand and name it as good—to see good even in the hard, to see beyond-perspective even in the right-here moments.

I remember that verse I read last week, the one about why I need to be where gratitude leads me:

It’s here in your presence, in your sanctuary,
where I learn more of your ways.
For holiness is revealed in everything you do.

Psalm 77:13 TPT

And silently my lips form a prayer: another Psalm—one read then memorized:

Teach me more about you, how you work and how you move,
so that I can walk onward in your truth
until everything within me brings honor to your name.

Psalm 86:11 TPT

Is that where this steady practice of holding gratitude in my heart takes me? To the place where “everything within me brings honor to [God’s] name”? To God being present in the ripples that reach beyond my home and touch my neighborhood and community? Oh, let it be so!

Gratitude beyond November

We conclude the #uncommonnormalgratitude2020 challenge this week, but if gratitude is awakening your heart and you, too, don’t want the journey to end, I invite you to follow along with the gratitude stories in Begin Within: A Gratitude Series. My vision for Begin Within is to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well.

Every Sunday morning I’ll be sharing a new story of how gratitude has impacted a life. If you’d like to receive these stories in your email inbox, let me know here:

Let’s end with one final prayer:

Lord, we rend our hearts. We embrace the posture of open. We lean hard into this practice of gratitude. Would You lead us ever deeper into You? May we bow low so Your glory may hover. May we bear the fragrance of Your nearness. May we be “lovely sanctuaries of your presence” in our homes and neighborhoods. May “everything within [us bring] honor to your name.” In Your holy and precious name, Jesus, we pray. Amen.

P.S. Did you know The Uncommon Normal is also a podcast? Tune in on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, or Spotify.

Read FREE with Kindle Unlimited or purchase on Kindle ($3.99) or as a paperback ($5.99). Group study questions included.