Three G's

The older I get, the more I am aware of the connection between and the importance of grace, gratitude, and generosity. They are essential ingredients for a life well lived. Grace, God's overwhelming love for us, is the foundation to which gratitude and generosity are anchored. In order of priority I would place gratitude next followed by generosity. To receive life as a gift from God, to understand and accept God's "overwhelming scandalous love," as David Ford phrases it, for us and for the creation, necessarily leads to an incredible sense of gratitude and to the opening of our own floodgates of generosity. The reason for this is that grace is a completely free and undeserved act of generosity on God's part. The experiencing of this kind of generosity renovates and transforms our own hearts, minds, and imaginations so that we seek to become like the One whose been so generous to us. Truly experiencing God's grace at the center of our being without experiencing both gratitude and generosity is like swimming in a lake without getting wet: it's not possible.

It seems to me that the church should be a community of people of unparalleled gratitude and generosity. Unfortunately, the church has a very mixed record in this regard. But I would submit that the healthier a church becomes, the more the three G's will present themselves. What thoughts do you have about the three G's and how The United Church of Christ in Medfield is in this regard? I hope you have a Thanksgiving full of the three G's!