This is not a money-back guarantee. This is a statement of heart-felt beliefs that draws on past experience to sustain present difficulties.

Someone has suggested that, "Without faith we are like stained glass windows in the dark." That image speaks to me. We are at our best admitting faith, just as these stained glass windows are admitting light.

I know -- we sometimes delude ourselves claiming things we do not really believe. Perhaps you have heard Paul Sweeney's definition of self-delusion. He says, "Self-delusion is pulling in your stomach when you step on the scales."

Contemporary legend has it that when the first Russian cosmonaut returned from orbiting the earth, he was interviewed by the officials at the Kremlin. The cosmonaut told them that he had seen God in space. They replied, "We were afraid of that. Don't tell anyone else." Later the cosmonaut was interviewed by the Pope, who asked him if he had seen God in outer space. Doing as he was told to do, he said, "I didn't see a thing." The Pope said, "I was afraid of that. Don't tell anyone else."

Faith is not belief in spite of evidence; it is life in scorn of consequences. So the wise father, writing in the Book of Proverbs, wants to instill in his child that kind of faith.

On the walls of Hind's Head Inn in Bray, England, is this inscription:

Fear knocked on the door.

Faith answered.

No one was there.

Gratitude

Words are as slippery as eels. How can we use them to grasp an idea so amorphous as gratitude? Writer Robert C. Newell gives us a good example in a story he tells: "Late one night when I was driving along an isolated road, the motor of my car stopped. A friendly traveler came along, took a rope from the trunk of his car, and towed my stalled car nearly thirty miles to a garage. When I insisted that he accept pay, he refused. He rejected my offer to fill his tank with gas. 'Well,' I said, 'I must in some way return your kindness.' The stranger replied, 'If you really want to show your gratitude, buy a rope and always carry it in your car."

The writer in Proverbs reminds his child to honor the Lord by making regular offerings from the best of all his crops. He was trying to instill in his child a sense of gratitude. He realized how life is fabricated. It is simply a fact of life that you cannot always take without giving. You simply have to develop an attitude about life, an attitude that makes you remember what others have given to you. That attitude is gratitude.

We do this, of course, on special days like Thanksgiving. But gratitude is too important an ideal to relegate to one day a year. We should be like a pack rat -- leaving something every time we take something. Think of peanuts. Farmers discovered peanuts are excellent to grow on the less-than-best soil because they put nitrogen into the soil. They enrich the very soil which gives them life. Isn't that a parable of gratitude?

A part of gratitude is also knowing when you have enough. As someone put it, "It's possible to own too much. A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure." In this frenzied race to accumulate more and more, isn't it about time to slow the pace and simply enjoy what we already have?