Hi, and welcome to Five Word Prayers Daily, a Five Day a Week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, and our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

Answer this statement, true or false. Sometimes I don't have enough gratitude for my life.

Now, this is a truth-telling, let's be on a show, so I hope we all answer that true.

I mean, do any of us really appreciate all that God has given us?

In this entitled culture, it's tough for us to recognize the gifts God gives us,

much less appreciate them as we should.

I want to talk about this a little in just a

minute.

My favorite author, or at least one of them, Brennan Manning used to write this phrase a lot.

All is grace.

He taught me a lot about grace in his writing, actually, and it's something that's been kind of a tough lesson for me, because first of all, I'm sort of hard on myself, a justice-driven person as well.

And then, too, I grew up in sort of a rigid

Christian world. Not necessarily my family, though we were quite conservative, but my denomination

and such at the time were just very hung up on the do's and don'ts, or at least to a young

child in that environment. That's what I perceived. And I certainly didn't

make the correlation between grace and gratitude necessarily. I mean, be grateful for things is also

what I was taught as a child. Though, again, growing up in the world with so much, it's hard to

know exactly how to do that. It's one of the reasons I loved my friend Anne Voskamp's book

several years ago called A Thousand Gifts because she really helped a lot of us be grateful

by making us count each gift no matter how small it seemed and that exposed us to a new

type of gratitude. But the reality is when we see our lives through the lens of all his grace,

...