Читать книгу Grateful and Generous Hearts - John H. Westerhoff III - Страница 5

Fulton Oursler, author of The Greatest Story Ever Told, ¹ tells the story of Anna, the old black woman who raised him as a child. One day, he writes, he was sitting in the kitchen and heard her say, “Much obliged, dear Lord, for my vittles.”

“What’s a vittle?” he asked.

“It’s whatever I’ve got to eat and drink,” she responded.

“But you’d get your vittles whether you thanked God or not!” he continued.

“Sure,” she said, “but it makes everything taste better to be thankful. You know, it’s a game an old preacher taught me to play. It’s about looking for things to be thankful for. Like one day I was walking to the store to buy a loaf of bread. I look in all the windows. There are so many pretty clothes.”

“But Anna, you can’t afford to buy any of them!” he interjected.

“Oh, I know, but I can play dolls with them. I can imagine your mom and sister all dressed up in them and I’m thankful. Much obliged, dear Lord, for playing in an old lady’s mind.”

“Then,” she continued, “one day, I got caught in the rain. I had heard about people taking showers and I’ve seen the one you use, and I thought, now I have one too. You know, God is just giving away heaven every day. Much obliged, dear Lord.”

Oursler ends his story with these words: “The soul of long-dead Anna was a big soul, big enough to see God everywhere, and she taught me a great deal about life; for I will never forget when word came to me from the dingy street where she lived that Anna was dying. I remember driving in a cab and standing by her bedside; she was deep in pain and her old hands were knotted together in a desperate clutch. Poor old woman, what had she to be thankful for now?”

“She opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘Much obliged, dear Lord, for such fine friends.’ She never spoke again except in my heart, but she speaks to me every day there, and I’m much obliged, dear Lord, for that.”

This is much more than a moving Pollyanna story. Anna was not simply an optimistic personality, one who, no matter what, could look on the bright side of things. She was, in Oursler’s words, “a big soul, big enough to see God everywhere.” She was in her heart a grateful person, one who had a deep sense that all of life is a gift. Taking nothing for granted, demanding nothing as her due, she recognized that we come into this world with nothing, we go out with nothing, and in between we are given all we have.

To be thankful is not to deny that life can be difficult and painful. It does not compel us to pretend that things are better than they are or to ignore the suffering and pain in our lives or in the lives of others. But being thankful does require us to acknowledge our creaturehood, our dependence, and our lack of self-sufficiency. And it does require us to express through grateful and generous hearts our thankfulness. “Much obliged, dear Lord, for all you have given us.”