My Most Treasured and Valuable Possession

What is my most treasured and valuable possession? Well,

my relationship with God would be first, of course, and
there might be various answers if I were going to come up
with a top five or something. But definitely, a grateful heart
(or a positive attitude, which is pretty much the same thing)
would come to my mind as being in there somewhere.

I have to admit that staying positive and grateful has been

more of a challenge recently. I get lost easily and have to refocus myself again. I
remind myself about someone I knew, an elderly woman who had had a very difficult
and painful life. She said, “some mornings I wake up and just don't want to get out of
bed. But then I open my eyes and I say, 'thank you, God, for my ceiling.' And I'm
able to go on from there.”

One reason a grateful heart is such a valuable possession is that a person could have
all sorts of wonderful and highly valuable tangible and intangible possessions, but
without a grateful heart, that person would gain little benefit from whatever other
blessings they might have. That person might barely notice the good things, or tend
to see all blessings as flawed or worthless or temporary.

(Temporary, I think, is not necessarily a bad thing. Temporary is often used as an

excuse to focus on the fear of loss so completely that we avoid attaching and miss
out on fully experiencing and enjoying the blessing we have been given. But we can
choose to change our focus and let, “temporary” become a reason to cherish and
fully value the particular blessing for whatever amount of time it is ours, whether that
blessing is a person, or an object, or good health, or whatever it may be.)

I believe that gratefulness, like many other qualities, is something that people possess
to varying degrees. Maybe each person is born with some particular amount of
gratefulness or some genetic predisposition toward gratefulness or lack of
gratefulness. And then various life experiences or depression or various other
factors have an influence in how gratefulness develops. Many of these factors an
individual may have very little control over.

Still, I believe there is some part of the mix that we can take more control of. We can
each take whatever portion of gratefulness we find ourselves possessing, at this
moment. We can examine it and we can carefully consider how we can begin to heal
the damage that life has done to it. We can nurture it, cultivate it, and, through our
loving care, encourage it to grow to its full potential.

RoseDQ August 23, 2010