Tim Arrigo talks about how tragedy often makes people appreciate what they have. He argues that gratitude matters now, before loss forces the lesson, and that recognizing your blessings, even your problems, is an act of grace.
Tragedy will wake you up to the gratitude that you lacked. Why does it always have to take a tragedy inside of our lives to make us become aware of the gratitude that we lacked? Somebody has to end up in the hospital, we have to have a near-death experience, somebody has to pass away for us to become grateful and aware of how short life actually is. And how blessed we actually are. I mean, so much of the time we talk negatively about our wives, we talk negatively about our partner, we talk negatively about the circumstances we're in, we talk negatively about people, places, and things. And then a tragedy strikes, and we're in an argument with your wife one day, and you're thinking, wow, I really hate these arguments, I can't stand the way my wife talks to me. And then, God forbid, your wife has a health there. She ends up in the hospital, and the first time that you get to finally talk to your wife again, you're grateful that you can even speak to her. You're grateful that you can even have a conversation with her. You're grateful for the arguments and that she's even in your life. But see, why do we have to have tragedy strike our life to become grateful for what we actually have? Do you know how blessed you are? How blessed you are to have somebody in your life that's committed to you unconditionally? You know how blessed you are, and you could sit back and you could say you're not, right? You could look at the glass as half empty, or you could look at it as half full. And see, that's the problem a lot of times, is it takes a tragedy inside our life to wake us up to the grace that God has freely offered us, to wake us up to how blessed we actually are, to wake us up, right, to the beauty that our life really is. When you pull back and get a new perspective. So my brother, if you haven't done this today, maybe you need to think about what you're grateful for. And maybe all the problems that you have going on in your life, maybe you need to become grateful for those too.
