I don't remember feeling grateful when I was young. My parents, of course, taught me to say thank you, and I always did. But that was a learned response. It was only after I became acquainted with God and began to understand my very special relationship to Him that I started to really feel gratitude. I first remember feeling grateful during Wednesday evening testimony meetings at a branch Church of Christ, Scientist, that I was attending after Christian Science came into my life many years ago.
At these meetings, people told about their healings—they told how they solved problems by turning to God, by understanding Him better and by understanding who they were as His spiritual children. The gratitude these people expressed was so sincere that they left a deep impression on me. And soon, when I began to have spiritual healings myself and learned how to apply my new understanding of God to difficult situations in order to heal them, I, too, began to have feelings of deep gratitude.
I discovered that gratitude was essential to my health and well-being.
