The Posture of Gratitude/ A Quality of the Soul
One of my favorite stories in the Bible is "The Ten Lepers" (Luke 17), and in remembering it today, I want to encourage you to practice being "one of the ten" who expresses gratitude and joy to God and to others.
If you've never read the story, it talks about how Jesus walked through this small village and saw a group of ten lepers. Naturally, the lepers stood at a distance, as people with this disease in those times were thought to be unclean... But they knew who Jesus was... and that he had the power to heal them, so they wasted no time in calling out to him for help. They said: "Jesus! Master! Have pity on us!" And he heard them and said: "Go show yourselves to the priests"...
So they went on their way to see the priests, and as they went, they looked at their skin and noticed that their leprosy was gone! Jesus healed their disease... In that moment, they were all so happy that they ran up and down the streets singing and dancing... but suddenly, one of them stopped... and went back... and praising God with a loud voice, the Bible said that he threw himself at Jesus' feet, and said, "Thank You!"
Then Jesus said to him, "Didn't I heal ten men...? Then where are the other nine..."? Has not one returned to give glory to God?
(And this is where I like to pause and reflect...)
I'm sure that we all can relate to being like these lepers at some point in our lives... busted, disgusted and maybe even lame... But we can also relate to the times that we cried out to God for help and saw his response to our cry through our many answered prayers.
Let us not live like "the nine" that got so excited about "the thing" they received that we forget to stop and thank God for providing it. Instead, try to be more like "one of the ten" and practice gratitude by saying thank you as often as you can.
-Chana
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