Eucharisteo:Thanksgiving

I recently finished reading One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, and it's transforming the way I walk through life day-to-day. It's essentially a challenge to count and name God's gifts in your life, to take time to recognize His grace and praise Him for it. “God is not in need of magnifying by us so small, but the reverse. It’s our lives that are little and we have falsely inflated self, and in thanks we decrease and the world returns right. I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and He stirs me, joy all afoot.”

I'm learning to give thanks for all manner of things... the small and the significant, the joyful and the challenging. Ann points out that we do not have the right or the proper perspective to be able to label gifts as being "good" or "bad". God has a purpose in the gifts He gives, and we are called to give thanks in all things. “That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave." At the Last Supper (the Eucharist), Jesus took the bread (representative of his body on the cross...the suffering), saw it as grace, and gave thanks to the Father. “God is always good and I am always loved. Everything is eucharisteo. Because eucharisteo is how Jesus, at the Last Supper, showed us how to transfigure all things—take the pain that is given, give thanks for it, and transform it into a joy that fulfills all emptiness.”

Eucharisteo, this naming and counting of God's gifts... it opens the eyes. Opens the eyes to God and grace and hope. “All the world is window. No material is opaque. If we are willing to see—people, circumstances, situations, relationships—all is transparent. All of this globe is but glass to God. And eucharisteo washes the glass. Eucharisteo, wholesale worship, its redemptive work wiping away the soot of days cindered."

I've been reminded, "A true saving faith is a faith that gives thanks, a faith that sees God, a faith that deeply trusts." This daily act of remembering, of giving thanks, of turning eyes away from the mess and upward to God, of praising Him... this is how we learn to trust, to truly believe... that God is good and faithful and loving.

All is a gift. All is grace.