“Gratitude outlaws blindness to present good”.
A friend shared this with me; we both gratefully pondered it, then went on with the day.
Later that same day, I got home to a well timed email . A blog called ’Spiritual Perspectives’, by Christian Science Practitioner Annette Kreutziger-Herr, furthering the subject on gratitude; It read:
“Use what you know and continue to grow. Stay with new ideas, fresh and freeing, gratefully, and then move forward differently - not with the yearning for another article or a different topic. Staying with new ideas long enough to understand them properly. And then live them. For there is a tendency in the human mind to jump to the next, to not properly digest the food already eaten; we don't need a puffed up sense of ego, but a grateful awe of God, the only Ego there is”.
This struck me deeply, “Had I expected good from the idea shared with me by my friend earlier. Did I expect that it could bless?
I re-visited the idea:
“Gratitude outlaws blindness to present good”.
I looked up the word ‘OUTLAW,’ and as I was thinking deeply about each word and how gratitude bans or forbids blindness to present good I felt a shift in my thinking, from a mortal sense of ‘Thank-you for the roof over my head and the food on my table and such like’, which are relevant and good, to a vast sense of praise for the spiritual truth about everything, present right now. A “God saw everything that He had made and behold is was very good” view point. It was breath taking.
It revealed to my thought that there could never be a moment when I could not be infinitely grateful for what is spiritually true about whatever confronted me because there is never a moment when Truth/God is not revealing itself to us in consciousness.
As bothersome things in my household tried to confront me the next morning, I refused to give them power or be impressed and instead rejoiced in the truth which perfect God was seeing. I felt such a sense of dominion that nothing that day could ruffle me and so I could only rejoice more when harmony became more apparent, a phone call brought an interview for one of my family who had been challenged with lack of work and a health issue improved for another. Its no wonder that gratitude has been called the oil of consciousness, it really moves thought.
As one of Mrs Eddys workers wrote:
Whenever there seems to be a need or lack in your experience, this simply indicates the scientific fact that this seeming need is already supplied by God’s gracious abundance. Then give thanks with your whole heart because you have learned in Christian Science that Gods supply is on hand. (M. Adelaide Stilll. “Reminiscences of the time I spent with Mrs Eddy May 1907 to Dec 1910. The MBE Collection.)