Like dessert, we tend to save gratitude for last—after we get “results.”
But gratitude isn’t a payoff—the reward we give back to God for bestowing on us the result we’re expecting. Rather, it’s our prayerful acknowledgment that good is always present, available, and uninterrupted. Isn’t that a sweet place to start with every prayer?
Prioritizing establishes importance and order, but human logic is far from an infallible guide to divine order. In fact, we inhibit this order when we set out a plan: 1) Beginning 2) Middle
3) End. Thinking of prayer in humanly reasoned terms, we pray first … see a result … and then give thanks. But if we follow Jesus’ example in the Bible—for instance, when he prayed to God before Lazarus was raised from the dead: “Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always” (John 11:41, 42)—we acknowledge that, from an entirely spiritual viewpoint, there is nothing to heal but a mistaken thought. The thought that we are somehow separated from God and need to “get” to Him, instead of knowing that we are already there—as His perfect idea and expression.
