Eucharisteo

Then came Peter unto him and said: “Lord, how often shall my brother offend against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” 

Matthew 18:21

What if it was God who offended us, will we be able to forgive Him? In the book, “One  Thousand Gifts”, author Ann Voskamp begins with the heartbreaking story of how her little sister Aimee was killed in front of their mother’s eyes when she wandered after a cat and was crushed by a delivery truck. For years the whole family was “closed to any notion of grace”. 

Ann asked her father if he ever used to go to church and he said he was done with all of it when Aimee died. That day branded all of their lives. But Ann, even while doubting God’s goodness and distrusting Him, desired a full life. She wanted to receive what God had to give, and she struggled to understand. As she lived through more heartbreak, she started to think that maybe, just maybe, there was “a way out of nightmares to dreams”. 

She got a hint of it in giving thanks. Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving. She read how Jesus took the bread and gave thanks, and then He was able to endure the cross. And it became rhema to her, an inspired Word from God, that ingratitude, our discontent with all that God freely gives, is how we fall, and fail. “We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks.” 

And Ann started a list of gifts from God. As her inventory of what she was grateful for grew longer, it felt like she was unwrapping His love. Ann learned the “secret to living joy in every situation.” And she was able to forgive, and to learn to live fully in gratitude even in the midst of sadness, despair or heartbreak.