“A lot of us religious types go around saying thank you to God when we find a good parking space, or locate the house keys or the wandering phone, or finally get a good night’s sleep. And while that might be annoying to the people around us , it’s important because if we’re lucky, gratitude becomes a habit. You say “Thank you” when something scary happened in your beloved and screwed-up family and you all came through (or most of you did), and you have found love in the intergenerational ruins (maybe a lot of love, or maybe just enough). Or you can look at what was revealed in the latest mess, and you say thanks for the revelation, because it shows you some truth you needed to know, and that can be so rare in our families, let alone in our culture, our world, and in our marriages, and in our relationships with our teenagers and ourselves…
“Most of us figure out by a certain age – some of us later than others – that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not all fair… but if you’ve been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.” (Help, Thanks, Wow. 48-50)
