This is going to be fairly short as my longwinded self has very little to add to the excerpt below lol. It is just such good "food for thought". It was taken from pg 31 of the book Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning I have been reading. The same book I mentioned in my last couple blogs as "SOOooo Good, but then SOooo Challenging." This is one of those challenging parts. One of the ones I didn't read for a while, but just skipped over because I just couldn't handle it yet. Just wasn't ready for it.

Chapter One deals with "The Way of Trust."

All of Chapter 2 deals with "The Way of Gratefulness," which was a surprise for me. Gratefulness is diffintely not a subject I expected to find in the second chapter of a book dedicated to finding trust in, and overcoming, *enormous* life-shaking, world-shattering, faith-questioning difficulties! In fact, it took me finishing the entire chapter, thinking on it for a few days, the Lord in all His graciousness reinforcing it with His Word in various ways, and then re-reading that entire chapter again, before I went back and read this paragraph and accepted it, then reread it again and again and again. Even now, having accepted that Gratefulness is indeed much needed in hard times... even when we can't stand up, but at least thankful for being able to sit...this one simple paragraph is still hard to swallow. So good, but oh so challenging! This is diffinitely one of those books I will keep in an "easy to get to place," and buy 5 copies to keep on hand to give away to others. Anyway, after a longwinded intro I said I wouldn't write lol, here is the paragraph: 

 from page 31 in chapter two: "The Way of Gratefulness" in the book "Ruthless Trust" By Brennan Manning:

"The sorely missed Henri Nouwem wrote of the spiritual work of gratitude:

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives- the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections- that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we'd like to forget, we can not claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God."

And also from Job, if anyone could understand suffering and trials, it would be this man...

"If we take happiness from God's hand,

must we not take sorrow too?"

 ~Job 1:10

SO CHALLENGING! I'm not quite there yet... I still want my baby boy in my arms! But all the same, the gratefulness I have felt lately has been the release of self induced legalism. Gratefulness abounds upon realizing there is nothing I can do so wrong to make God abandon me, and nothing I can do so right to make Him love me more. What the Bible says is TRUE! *gasp* imagine that! lol! But oh the difference it makes when it goes from the page to reality! The difference from a free concept to a life changing freedom! 

How very grateful I am for a God so loving and so very active that I have not only "seen the guiding hand of God," but have *felt* it as well. And now, only because of that, only at this moment in time, have I been able to look around and see all God has actively done, and abound in gratefulness. If anyone had told this to me earlier, too soon, it would've hurt and I probably would've felt it to be one of the most insensitve judgemental things anyone could have said for what we are enduring. Amazing how God heals, how He prepares the heart, and how He chooses to bring about His realities of comfort in His own timing and variety of ways!

"And God is able to make all grace abound toward you..."

 ~2 Corinthians 9:8

"Praise be to the Lord,

to God our Savior,

who daily bears our burdens.

Selah."

~Psalm 68:19

"My soul will boast in the LORD;

let the afflicted hear and rejoice."

~Psalm 34:2