If God is found in our hard times, then all of life, no matter how apparently insignificant or difficult, can open us to God’s work among us.\u00c2\u00a0 To be grateful does not mean repressing our remembered hurts.\u00c2\u00a0 But as we come to God with our hurts — honestly, not superficially — something life changing can begin slowly to happen.\u00c2\u00a0 We discover how God is the One who invites us to healing.\u00c2\u00a0 We realize that any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step….<\/p>\n
The mystery of the dance is that its movements are discovered in the mourning.\u00c2\u00a0 To heal is to let the Holy Spirit call me to dance, to believe again, even amid my pain, that God will orchestrate and guide my life.<\/p>\n
We tend, however, to divide our past into good things to remember with gratitude and painful things to accept or forget.\u00c2\u00a0 This way of thinking, which at first glance seems quite natural, prevents us from allowing our whole past to be the source from which we live our future.\u00c2\u00a0 It locks us into a self-involved focus on our gain or comfort.\u00c2\u00a0 It becomes a way to categorize, and in a way, control.\u00c2\u00a0 Such an outlook becomes another attempt to avoid facing our suffering.\u00c2\u00a0 Once we accept this division, we develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be glad about than things to be resentful about, more things to celebrate than to complain about.<\/p>\n
Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully.\u00c2\u00a0 And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy.\u00c2\u00a0 We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens….<\/p>\n
If mourning and dancing are part of the same movement of grace, we can be grateful for every moment we have lived.\u00c2\u00a0 We can claim our unique journey as God’s way to mold our hearts to greater conformity to Christ.\u00c2\u00a0 The cross, the primary symbol of our faith, invites us to see grace where there is pain; to see resurrection where there is death.\u00c2\u00a0 The call to be grateful is a call to trust that every moment can be claimed as the way of the cross that leads to new life….<\/p>\n
I am gradually learning that the call to gratitude asks us to say, “Everything is grace.”\u00c2\u00a0 As long as we remain resentful about things we wish had not happened, about relationships that we wish had turned out differently, mistakes we wish we had not made, part of our heart remains isolated, unable to bear fruit in the new life ahead of us.\u00c2\u00a0 It is a way we hold part of ourselves apart from God.<\/p>\n
Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning Into Dancing:\u00c2\u00a0 Finding Hope in Hard Times, <\/em>p. 16-19<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If God is found in our hard times, then all of life, no matter how apparently insignificant or difficult, can open us to God’s work among us.\u00c2\u00a0 To be grateful does not mean repressing our remembered hurts.\u00c2\u00a0 But as we come to God with our hurts — honestly, not superficially — something life changing can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gratitude","category-healing","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}