Throughout October, we are exploring Thanks-living — the practice of living gratefully each day. Together, we’ll reflect on gratitude as God’s provision, a source of strength in difficult times, an action we embody, a sacred trust we hold, and a pathway toward God’s Kin-dom of peace.
Interestingly, modern research across psychology, neuroscience, and health sciences is now confirming what people of faith have known for centuries — that a grateful heart transforms how we experience life. Each week this month, you’ll find a posting on a specific gratitude practice, along with some fascinating research insights that connect faith and science. We hope you will enjoy this interesting research.
Attentive Gratitude: This week’s focus is on what psychologists call ‘attentive gratitude’. Regular, short gratitude journaling can build a habit of noticing blessings, even in the ordinary days. In one large-scale randomized trial of 1,337 adults, participants wrote daily gratitude lists for 14 days (recalling moments they were thankful for) and found increases in positive affect, life satisfaction, and happiness, and reductions in negative affect and depression symptoms. Read the full study here. PubMed.
Another study found that gratitude interventions among working adults found that listing what you are grateful for improved stress and depression in many cases—but the effects on broader well-being were more inconsistent and seemed linked to frequency and intensity of the practice. PubMed
Lastly, attentive gratitude has the effect of “Brightening the Mind”. In a study with college students, it was found that practicing gratitude significantly improved focus and resilience in learning contexts. You can read the study here… IUScholarWorks
May our Thanks-living help us remember that gratitude is not just a feeling—it’s a healthy way of seeing and being in the world.
Friends, today we gather to reflect on what it means to live with gratitude. Not just to feel thankful, but to become thankful people. We all know what it’s like to say a polite “thank you.” We do it when someone holds the door, or when we’re handed a warm cup of tea. But gratitude, as Scripture reminds us, runs much deeper than good manners. Gratitude is not just a momentary feeling…it’s a way of being in the world.
What if gratitude wasn’t just a response to something good that happens, but the foundation for how we live…even when life is hard, when life is uncertain, or (even) when life is ordinary? That’s what I think was meant by the term ‘Thanks-Living’. When thanksgiving turns into a lifestyle, into a verb, gratitude that takes shape as generosity and we become people of thanks-living.
Our first text takes us to the Hebrew Psalter. A song book of worship. Psalm 100, begins with the joyful words that we sang: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come into [God’s] presence with singing.” Scholars propose that this psalm was used as a call to worship in the Temple. It was a kind of invitation to remember who we are and whose we are. And the heart of it is found in verse 3: “Know that the Lord is God. It is [God] that made us, and we are [God’s]; we are [God’s] people, the sheep of [God’s] pasture.”
Gratitude, the psalmist says, begins with belonging. It’s not first about what we possess, but about who we belong to. Before we can live as people of thanks-living, we first are thankful for whose we are. This was our beginning point of the conversation two weeks ago as we pondering ‘Thanks-livng as Remembrance’. We belong to God: a God who made us, a God who sustains us, a a God who calls us by name. And because of that belonging, we are freed to live joyfully, to serve with gladness, and to share from the abundance that all stems from God’s grace.
Going a little deeper in to the 100th Psalm, we quickly notice that the psalmist connects gratitude with service. “Serve the Lord with gladness.” The Hebrew word ‘abad’ can mean both to serve and to worship. It’s the same word used for tending the Garden of Eden…for cultivating life. So, when we serve others, when we act with love, when we create and nurture, those are all ways of worshipping. Many gathered at the Storehouse Society for the food ministry. We sliced and diced and cooked. We dined together in gratitude. Gratitude, then, is not just an emotion we feel in private. It’s something we live out in the world. Thanks-living is found in the ways we treat one another; the ways we work, the ways we care for the world. It is an action word…a verb! That’s what it means to move from gratitude to thanks-living…to make gratitude visible, tangible, and active.
In the gospel passage, Luke tells the story of Jesus healing ten people with leprosy. Ten are healed, but only one actively responds…returning to give thanks. And Luke makes sure we know that this one was a Samaritan…an outsider, a foreigner, someone on the margins. It’s often said this story is about gratitude, and it is, but it’s also about awareness. Ten were healed, but only one saw the deeper grace at work. Luke uses a key word here: The Samaritan “saw” that he was healed. The Greek word ‘eidō’ means more than just noticing something with your eyes. It means to perceive, to understand, to grasp what is really going on beneath the surface. Nine saw the gift. One saw the Giver. Gratitude begins when we start seeing grace in the ordinary: in breath taken, in friendship shared, in beauty enjoyed, in the living of our daily struggles. When we see that life itself is grace, we can’t help but be moved to generosity. That’s the shift from gratitude to thanks-living: We stop clutching, and start sharing. We stop striving for more, and start giving from what we have. Like the Psalm, Luke’s story is full of movement. Did you notice all the verbs: “They stood at a distance,” “they called out,” “they went,” “he turned back,” “he praised,” “he fell at Jesus’ feet.”
Gratitude is not static. It is dynamic…it moves us. It moves us from distance to nearness, from fear to trust, from receiving grace to becoming grace for others. When Jesus says to the Samaritan, “Your faith has made you well,” the Greek word ‘sōzō’ doesn’t just mean “healed.” It means saved, made whole, restored. All ten were physically healed. But one was made whole…complete. Gratitude heals the soul. It transforms our ways of seeing…into action; our ways of being into thanks-living.
And so, putting them together, if Psalm 100 shows us that gratitude begins with belonging and moves into service, then Luke 17 shows us that gratitude deepens into recognition and response. Together, they paint a picture of gratitude that is lived. It is NOT a fleeting feeling, but an action. It is the steady practice of generosity: living, serving, caring, loving. When gratitude moves from our hearts to our hands and our feet; when it becomes the way we live, that’s gratitude in action…that’s thanks-living.
So how might this look in your life? How might your live gratitude as an active part of your faith? I wanted for us to look at three simple practices of thanks-living: ways to let gratitude shape our daily rhythm. Firstly, pay Attention…When we pay attention, we are gifted, like the Samaritan leper, to see Grace in the Ordinary. The Samaritan, began by seeing what God is doing. We are in such a rush, these days. Before we rush through our day, pause. Look for moments of quiet grace. These are the ones we so easily miss. Psychologists call this attentive gratitude. It’s the habit of noticing blessings in real time. Try this question at the end of your day when you pray and record your gratitude: “Where did I see goodness today?” It might be something small — a smile, a bit of music, the comfort of being together. When we pay attention to grace, generosity just grows naturally.
Secondly, let gratitude lead You to generosity. Psalm 100 says, “Serve the Lord with gladness.” The most powerful form of gratitude is not what we say…it’s what we do. When we serve someone in need, when we give time or resources, when we speak words that build others up…when we live gratitude, we are turning our gratitude into generosity. We are saying with our actions, “I have received love, so I will live love.” This is where thanks-living becomes contagious. Our generosity inspires others to see grace and continue to pay it forward.
And finally, live gratefully in relationships. There’s one more kind of generosity that is so easily overlooked: the generosity of grace and forgiveness. Living thankfully also means letting go of bitterness. Because resentment and gratitude can’t occupy the same space. When you are filled with one, there is no room for the other. When we forgive, when we release our grip on anger, we make room for joy; we make room for peace; we make room for God. Thanks-living is not naïve about life’s pain, but it chooses grace as the road ahead. It says: Even in the hard places, God’s love is still real. And because of that, I can still be generous with mercy, generous with compassion, generous with hope.
Psalm 100 ends with the words: “For the Lord is good; [God’s] steadfast love endures forever, and [God’s] faithfulness to all generations.” That’s the song of thanks-living. It is a song that echoes across generations, a melody that calls us to live open-handed and open-hearted. To live as if every breath is a gift. To see grace and then to become grace. To live not out of scarcity, but out of God’s overflowing love. So, friends, may your gratitude be alive and living. May your thanksgiving turn into thanks-living. And may your life itself become a song of lived generosity, sung in harmony of God’s grace.
Amen.