I am grateful this evening for the gifts God has given me, or to put it in less spiritual terms, the abilities I was born with and have developed over the course of my life. I was likely born with a measure of intelligence as well as a variety of skills and talents that appear to be innate, inborn, genetic. When you add to those naturally-occurring talents the life opportunities I’ve had to receive a good education in primary and secondary levels that prepared me for college and ultimately graduate work, what you arrive at is a reasonably talented individual. It is difficult to say this with a straight face and not sound incredibly arrogant; and it is certainly not my intention to do so. I am simply acknowledging the blessings of having been born healthy (something which I do not take for granted given the infant mortality rates around the world,) as well as being born into a social class that allowed me to go to good schools and be well educated.
This good fortune set me up to be in a position to get into and excel in college, which paved the way for me to go to graduate school. I am now in the one percent of the US population who has a doctorate, and when you factor gender into it I am among the .7 percent of women who hold a doctorate. If my doctorate were in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) that would make me rarer still. Again, this is not to boast about anything as much as it is to acknowledge the good fortune I’ve had to have grown up in a family where education was highly valued. Both of my parents were college educated, which is yet another blessing: I grew up in a household with two parents. Having lived for a number of years as a single parent raising two children I know just how fortunate I was to have had the support and love of both of my parents as I was growing up.
Gratitude is like that: a causal chain of sorts where you realize that being grateful for one thing uncovers another thing to be grateful for and that in turn uncovers another. It goes to show that when you start looking for the blessings in your life it’s pretty hard not to see them.
I am grateful for the gifts of compassion, intuition, wisdom, and understanding. These are things I’ve discovered residing in me, they’ve become part of my personality, of the way I walk in the world. It has not always been so; it is in fact becoming so, a little more each day. How do I know about these gifts? I can feel them in the way I interact with people and the energy they feed back to me. There’s a kind of knowing that’s hard to describe when you are acting in alignment with your gifts; an effortlessness that comes about when you use your gifts in service to others. It is that combination that Frederick Buechner spoke of when he said, “The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I am not always sure that I have yet found that place to which God has called me, but I am grateful to be able to offer the gifts, talents, education and experiences accumulated over the 50-plus years I’ve been alive. And, as I think on it this evening, I see that it is good. So let it be!
