Gratitude

I tried looking at gratitude in the Topical Guide and it simply pointed to the entries for ingratitude and thanksgiving. Looking at thanksgiving definitely indicates that thanksgiving is treated as an attitude or lifestyle rather than simply as an act.

The thing that for me thinking about the topic was our lesson in Elder’s Quorum today which was a discussion of President Uchtdorf’s talk from last conference entitled Grateful in Any Circumstances. The more I thought about it, the more I began to see gratitude as being like faith in nature. We can’t simply have abstract gratitude, even if we are striving to be grateful in any circumstances more than grateful for things. Like faith, gratitude must have a noon that it is applied to. The way to be grateful in any circumstances I’d to direct or gratitude to something that transcends any circumstances. We need to cultivate a gratitude that is absolute rather than relative. It’s not “I’m grateful for {X} because it could be worse” but simply “I’m grateful for {X}.”