The Miracle of Gratitude

Before Jesus fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, He gave thanks. Before Jesus gave Priesthood power and authority to His disciples, He gave thanks. Before Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, He gave thanks. Before Jesus instituted the Sacrament, He gave thanks. If we need more miracles, if we need more of God’s power in our lives, then we ought to give more thanks. When we give thanks, we place more value on faith and hope than on fear and doubt. When we give thanks we put our trust in the Lord and His plan. We believe in God’s abundance, and His goodness, and His inexhaustible love. Gratitude allows miracles to get their foot in the door. When we take a moment to consider our blessed and happy state, when we pause to truly and sincerely marvel at all of the countless ways that our lives are better than they have any right to be, then we accept the reality of the miracles that are already in progress. As impossible as it may seem, God, with all of His billions of children and all of their contradictory prayers and desires, He nevertheless finds the time to hear and answer our prayer, to care about what we care about, to work a miracle in our life. All it takes is to believe in one impossible thing. If we can believe in one impossibility, even if it is as small as a grain of mustard, then we have opened up the doors to the thrilling, dizzying infinite array of impossibilities, and may even move mountains. A mustard seed weighs about half a gram. If you were to gather that much antimatter and allow it to explode, it would release about 20 kilotons of energy, or more or less the same amount that was released by the atomic bombs dropped in World War II. With that kind of energy, you could literally move mountains. Just as antimatter releases an enormous amount of power when it comes into contact with regular matter, miracles release an enormous amount of power when they come into contact with our regular lives. Gratitude lets the miracles in. No. Gratitude lets us realize that the miracles are already here, all around us. If we thank God for some tiny, ordinary, almost impossible to spot miracle, then that tiny miracle can cause a chain reaction. To them that receive, more shall be given. We thank God for what He has given us, He will give us more. We thank Him more, He gives us even more. We go from being grateful over a tiny mustard seed of a miracle to eventually being so moved with Gratitude that God begins to move mighty mountain-sized miracles. With five loaves and two fishes Christ can feed five thousand. With twelve disciples Christ can grow His church until billions believe in Him. There will never be a limit to how much we owe in gratitude to our Savior. When we have thanked God from the very bottom of our hearts, God will pile more and more mountains of miracles and blessings upon us, and when we have descended again to the depths of humility and gratitude, God will pile His miracles and blessings even higher still. We must never grow tired of thanking God, because God will never grow tired of blessing us.