Playing ‘Gratitude Game’ With God

By Mesha Oh

When I was little, I was taught a beautiful prayer—perhaps by my late mother. You might be familiar with the prayer—it is, I think, quite well known.

The prayer goes like this:

Thank You God for the world so sweet.

Thank You God for the food we eat.

Thank You God for the birds that sing.

Thank You God for everything.

I don’t know how, but as I grew older, I completely stopped praying. I might never have claimed that I was an atheist, but I was probably very close to being just that in terms of my lifestyle. The miseducation I received in the supposedly ‘excellent’ institutions that I studied in probably had something to do with it, as did my own descent into a life of sensual indulgence.

With God’s grace, however, many decades later, my prayer-life began to revive. And, these days, I often recite the beautiful ‘Thank You God’ prayer, as I did when I was a child.

The ‘Thank You God’ prayer is an expression of gratitude to the Creator. It reminds us that everything has its origin in God. It conveys the message that all that we have been blessed with is a gift from God, for which we need to be grateful to Him.

Expressing gratitude to God, the Author of all things, is a virtue that is taught in various religious traditions. When we express our gratitude to God for things, we recognize that He is the One Who has given them to us. It is an acknowledgement of a fact or reality—that everything comes ultimately from Him. Being grateful to God engenders humility. It helps us remember that of our own we are nothing and that without God, we can do nothing on our own and can obtain nothing, every ability and thing we have being a gift from the Creator.

Cultivating and expressing gratitude to God for all His blessings is a great way to be happy. Gratitude helps us focus on the things we have, rather than what we don’t have, which makes us more content. A contented person is a definitely happier person than someone who is ungrateful for what he has and who routinely complains about what he doesn’t.

Being grateful to God for all that we have been blessed with is just plain good manners. If someone gives us a gift, it is good manners to thank them for it. If someone invited us over for dinner or helped us with a chore, it would be good manners to thank them for their kindness. In quite the same way, it is good manners to thank God for blessings He has blessed us with.

Making expression of gratitude to God a regular habit is actually quite simple. We need only look around us and within ourselves or reflect on the course of our life so far to recognize many, many things that God has blessed us with, for which we can express our gratitude to Him.

One can engage in the practice of expressing gratitude to God any time of the day, because at any and every moment we can witness things for which we can be grateful to God for or remember such things from our past. At the same time, it is good to set apart some time at least once a day when we consciously bring to mind things we can express our gratitude to God for. A good time to do this is shortly before going to bed. One can do it in a light, fun sort of way, like a game.

Here are some suggestions for how we can play a ‘Gratitude Game’ with God:

We can begin with words like this, “Okay God, let’s play the Gratitude Game! God, everything I have, everything about me, is a gift from You. I’m going to try to remember some of these things! Okay, let’s start!”

Closing our eyes, we can reflect on some of the things God has blessed us with that day and maybe also in the past and express our thanks to Him for them. “Thank You God for the breakfast, lunch and dinner,” we might say, or “Thank You God for the lovely short nap this afternoon”, or “Thank You God for the rain this evening.” We can thank God for some of the comforts we enjoyed that day—from running water and electricity to the presence of family members, friends and colleagues.

We can recount the various people we met during the course of the day who helped us in some way or the other and thank God for them. We can think of those we may have helped during the day and thank God for giving us the opportunity of being of service to them. We can also bring to mind one or more incidents from the past where God brought us out of a challenging situation and thank Him for His help. Or, we can recall one or more happy moments from the past and express our gratitude to God for them.

Wherever we may be sitting, we can look about and thank God for some of the things that we see around us. For instance, if we are sitting at our office desk, we might say, “Thank You God for this computer! Thank You God for this chair that I’m sitting on. Thank You God for the lovely view from the window. Thank You God for this job…”. Or, if we are in a park, we might say, “Thank You God for this lovely place. Thank You God for the birds and the plants here. Thank You God for the breeze…” If we are in our bedroom, we might say, “Thank You God for the sheets, for the blanket, for the pillow, for the mattress, for the bed, for the fan, for the windows…”

And so on and on and on…The list of things we can thank God for is really very long! Doing it like a game can make expressing gratitude to God a real fun way to spend time chatting with God every day!