Begin with Gratitude: A Gentler Way to Enter the Day

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Weekly Dulin Podcast, a brief weekly reflection from Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Here, we take time to think together about faith, community, and what it means to live as disciples of Jesus in today's world.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's me, Henry, your pastor. It's good to be with you for another week of the Dulin Weekly Moment, Dulin Weekly Podcast, however you consume this time together. It's good to be with you. I've been paying particular attention to some of my personal spiritual practices recently.

I don't know about you, but sometimes I get a little, it becomes rote And I lose track of the meaning behind what I'm doing. So one of the things I've renewed recently is my gratitude practice, my morning practice of being thankful. So after I get up now for some of you, there might be a window of time right after you get up. For me, I get up, I fix breakfast for the rest of the family. We have coffee and then breakfast together.

They get ready for work. And I come back to sit and do my morning prayer and meditation and my gratitude practice. And that gratitude practice has been very important to me recently. If you begin your day from a place of gratitude, of thankfulness, it changes the way the day kind of develops, at least it has for me. It doesn't change necessarily any of the actions that happen or any of the events that happen in your day, the challenges you're ready to face, the difficulties as well as the good things.

But what it does do for me, and I suspect it might do the same for you, is change the perspective on how things are going. So I choose a number. For me, my gratitude practice for the longest time has a minimum of number of 10. So I will sit and begin to ponder the things, the people, the actions, myself, whatever it may be for which I'm thankful. Thankfulness for me began before I even came to my chair.

It's interesting when you get back in the practice of doing a gratitude practice. When I went back, when I went into the kitchen this morning after I got up to make the morning coffee for Linda and myself, and I was the water was already boiled, ground the beans, put it in the pour over the Chemex so I could do pour over. And I began to pour over. And I just noticed the fragrance of the coffee as it was coming up. Very first thing that was rising for me.

And I was thinking to myself how thankful I was just for the simple ability to smell and for the aroma of that coffee as it was in the process of blooming in the pour over pot. Simple things like that. So then I sat down this morning in my chair and I began to write them down. I wrote about coffee. I wrote about the feel of the warm cup in my hands in the morning with the coffee.

We set the same ceramic cups that we share. And the warmth of that cup, the taste of that coffee as it sat on my tongue before I swallowed, all of those little things kind of began a foundation for my day with being thankful. Now you may not drink coffee, you may drink tea. You may not drink tea or coffee. It might just be a glass of water.

And maybe first thing in the morning when you wake up and your mouth is a little parched and you take that glass of water and you take a sip, it might just be the feeling of new moisture in your mouth and that dryness dissipating with the taste of that water, something to be thankful for. What I realized as I was writing those 10, it's a minimum. So for me today was 16. People, places, things, challenges I'm facing for which I'm thankful. And as I let those roll off, as I began to ponder and think and be thankful for each of those people, places, and things, I found an inner peace rising up inside of me.

The restlessness that I sometimes feel when I sit down to do my morning meditation. I talked a little bit about this in the sermon this past week. That restlessness, that just trying to get through the time instead of letting the practice happen moment by moment, that gratitude rose up in me and there was a kind of a peace and a grounding that happened for me as I was sitting thankfully in the chair. Throughout the rest of the morning, When I went to today happens to be Wednesday that I'm recording this. You'll be watching it on Thursday or perhaps after that.

Wednesday mornings is a morning that I often go and have a cup of coffee with some local clergy here in the Falls Church area. Usually includes the pastor of Christ Crossman, JP Hong, and it has included wide and disparate other folks, Beverly Hills Community, United Methodist Church, the associate from Clarendon United Methodist Church, others have joined together at Paris Baguette on a Wednesday morning for coffee. And I carried that gratitude in. And as I was listening to one of my colleagues talk and ask questions and share some thoughts, I was just thankful. And I noticed how my walking to the coffee shop, my walking back from the coffee shop, my conversation with Katie when I got into the office, All of those pieces kind of shaped around thankfulness.

It was a kind of a gentler way to enter the day. Sometimes I wonder if I have enough, if I am enough to face the everyday. And I talked about this in another one of my podcasts just yesterday, the Infinitely Precious Podcast, What It Means to Be Enough. When I start from a place of thankfulness, then I feel more satisfied with what I have. Because the things for which I'm thankful, the people for which I'm thankful, the events in my life for which I'm thankful are already mine.

I already have them. There's not the grasping after more. Gratitude is an acceptance of and the thankfulness about that which is already a part of my life. And I can be thankful and hold it gently in my hand as something that isn't it wonderful that the divine has presented to me the opportunity to share the life with certain people, to be involved in certain events, to face certain challenges. Even challenges are things for which we can be grateful.

Just having awakened this morning, I can be thankful for that. Gratitude has the opportunity to reshape your life. Wherever you find yourself, wherever you find yourself listening to this or perhaps watching this, if you're watching the moment or listening if it's the podcast, I encourage you to stop. Now, if you're driving, you know, maybe gratitude practice is not necessarily appropriate behind the wheel depending upon how stressful your driving is. But take a moment if you're not in a place that you have to be doing something right now, take a moment to step back and just think of one something in your life, one someone in your life for whom you're thankful right now.

Let that sink in. Let being thankful sink in. And as you make gratitude a regular part of your daily practice, And when I say daily practice and if you skip a day and if it doesn't happen, don't use that as an excuse to kind of beat yourself up or feel badly. Let gratitude rise as it does. If you miss offering gratitude today, there's no reason that you can't do it this afternoon or this evening before bed or whenever it comes to you.

Let that gratitude flow up from you and see if over time as you sit in gratitude, it doesn't change the way you receive all of life as it comes. It was hot outside today. But I was walking in the morning, so it wasn't as hot as it was going to be. And I was thankful for the temperature. I was thankful when I passed through the shade on my sidewalk walk to Paris Baguette.

I was thankful when I came into the Dulin Church building where it was cooler and the air was drier, less humid. And I felt it on my skin almost immediately. The opportunity to be thankful helps us recognize we have enough. It helps us to be generous in the way that we give to others of our time and talents and treasure because we recognize how much we have to be thankful for. And sharing it with someone else suddenly seems like a natural thing to do.

So I invite you to add gratitude practice to your life. It has certainly made a huge difference in mine. Pick a number. It can be three. It can be one.

It can be 10 like me. It can be more. It's not so much that you get to the number. And there are some days I can't get to 10, and it's okay. If I'm really thankful for seven, that's good enough, but my target is 10.

And sometimes I write 15. Today I told you I wrote 16. Let it become your practice. Make it your own. Do it your own way.

But let thankfulness become a part of your life. All that we have, our lives, our thoughts, these bodies we live in, the friends and family, the people that we love, all of them are a gift to us from the divine. We can be thankful for that. And perhaps it reshapes the way we enter and engage our everyday lives. Just a thought for this week.

Remember, you are precious and loved. And until the next time I see you, I wish you all the very best.