Gifts and Gratitudes - a 5-Day Reading Planనమూనా

For years, when one of the kids brought in a fistful of Queen Anne’s lace, summer’s scattered doilies, it was then I’d slip a vase off the shelf for the gathered flowers.

Or when our boys raced in with the first profusion of wild daffodils from the ditches, or when my farmer husband would stop the tractor at the edge of the side road and fill his arms with tiger lilies growing, carrying flowers home as a surprise.

I’d only get a vase down then.

Because the way I thought was like this:

Have beauty. Now must get a vessel.

But when my farming man gave me these four old crocks, all just thrift store finds, everything shifted a bit differently. Because I made these vases furniture, vases that always remained out—permanent fixtures in a house that could be wired for glory, that could hunt for beauty to fill up with.

My thinking shifted to go like this:

Have vessel. Now must find beauty.

Empty containers can make us seekers, hunters of glory, searchers of beauty and grace and goodness. I changed my thinking: I need to find grace/beauty to fill the emptiness, not bought beauty—beauty that can only be bought with me paying attention: A wildflower from the roadside. A branch from the woods, grasses growing long in the ditches, zinnias from the garden, a happy round face from the sunflower patch. . . .

What if we all become a motley tribe of beauty hunters? What if today, in the midst of everything tender and complicated and painful, there was a way to slow and see that the world’s beauty outweighs its burdens, its grace greater than its grime?

When gratitude journals become permanent life furniture, white spaces opened wide, empty pages like cups to heaven, waiting to be filled with the color of His graces . . . something inside shifts, and we become seekers and lookers and noticers and God-hunters.

This can be a daily ceremony, this gathering of grace, joy to fill the emptiness, the glory of the Father never fading.

Prayer

Lord God, You are the Hound of Heaven who hunts the lost down and captures us with grace. Today, make me the hound of now who hunts for glory and captures joy with just that one word: thanks.