Dear friend,
Now thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift!
There is a particular trouble in feeling grateful that no one warns you about, which is the trouble of where to put it. Gratitude wants an address. It wants somewhere to land, and often the person or the moment that caused it cannot hold the whole weight of what you feel, so the feeling overflows the edges of its occasion.
Paul ends his letter to the Corinthians about generosity with a strange little exclamation, thanking God for a gift he does not name and does not describe. I have always thought that was deliberate. He calls it indescribable, which is not the same as calling it wonderful or large. He is telling them, and telling us, that some gratitude outruns the sentence built to hold it.
In 1999 I remember standing in my kitchen after a phone call with good news, wanting to thank someone and finding that no one in the room was quite large enough to receive it. I have wondered since whether that sensation, the gratitude with nowhere left to go, is itself pointing somewhere.
What do you do with the gratitude that is too big for the person who caused it?
A prayer
God, thank You for the gift in her life that feels too large for words. Receive what she cannot fully say, and let her thanksgiving rest somewhere solid tonight. Amen.