On Mondays, I’ll be sharing a quote from Christian history to help us learn and grow by engaging with those Christians who come before us as we sit at a soul table. The following quote comes from Henri Nouwen as he writes Bread for the Journey. It’s a daily devotional with lots of deep spiritual insights. You can discover more about Henri Nouwen here and here.

“To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all our lives — the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections — that requires hard spiritual work.

“Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

“Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.”