My wife and I were driving from Pennsylvania to Arizona. It was Wednesday evening, and we had been driving since early dawn. In a little town west of Oklahoma City, a small Christian Science church provided us with one of the most inspiring services we ever attended. The Christ presence, expressed in love and gratitude, filled that hour with the radiant joy of renewal and spiritual refreshment. And everyone attending gave a testimony of healing.
Have you ever thought of gratitude as riches? Hymn No. 249 in the Christian Science Hymnal tells us that:
Our gratitude is riches,
Complaint is poverty,
Our trials bloom in blessings,
They test our constancy.
O, life from joy is minted,
An everlasting gold,
True gladness is the treasure
That grateful hearts will hold.
Gratitude is effective prayer. Thanksgiving, or giving thanks, is vital to life, indispensable in expressing our spiritual completeness as the perfect child of God. What we are really doing when giving thanks is acknowledging God, the origin, or source, of all good. As the Bible says, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." James 1:17. With this spiritual recognition, healing becomes natural. Giving thanks is a form of grace that reveals more of God's nature and love and brings its own blessings of health and harmony into our experience.
The best example of one taking the path of gratitude as a vital, first priority in life is the Saviour, Christ Jesus. He is sometimes referred to as the Way-shower. In Jesus' healing work a grateful heart was clearly evident. He often began his prayer with thanksgiving, acknowledging Spirit, God, as the sole source of his ability to demonstrate God's healing and sustaining power. For example, in the raising of Lazarus he said, before the fact was evident, "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me." John 11:41. And he fed a large multitude with just five barley loaves and two small fish after he had given thanks. See John 6:9, 11 . Because of the importance Jesus gave to gratitude and the significant role it played in his healing ministry, shouldn't we accept gratitude as indeed able to enrich our own lives?
Mary Baker Eddy asks in Science and Health, "Are we really grateful for the good already received?" A spiritual promise is linked to our experience by her saying "Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we have, and thus be fitted to receive more." Science and Health, p. 3.
A couple who are students of Christian Science proved this in their own business. Their restaurant needed 50 percent more customers in order to meet expenses and return a profit. When they requested help from a Christian Science practitioner, he asked them if they fully appreciated the customers already coming to their restaurant. The couple saw the need to include in their prayers more gratitude for what they already had received, and this appreciation was applied to all phases of their operation. In a short time their business doubled!
Gratitude is a potent help for healing. It furnishes inspiration, uplifting us to the realization that divine Love can improve every aspect of our life. It enables us to respond more trustingly and readily to divine Mind's effective guidance.
Prayers interwoven with sincere appreciation bring deliverance from fear, anxiety, depression, and from troubles associated with them. Even common logic tells us that one's heart cannot truly be filled with gratitude and at the same time be anxious, fearful, or depressed. Gratitude aids in illuminating and spiritualizing consciousness to see life as the emanation of Spirit, not of matter, the antipode of Spirit. Then all that is unlike God can more easily be understood and proved as nothingness—on the basis of the allness of Truth.
To thank God daily for His loving care, which we know is constantly provided, is to see evidence of what countless people have already proved, that prayer is more readily answered when our heart is filled with gratitude.
