Live in Thanksgiving always. – Alma 34:38

Glory is the reciprocal of gratitude.

Glory also reciprocates praise and worship. Those are the obvious reciprocals. Gratitude is less obvious but perhaps more to the point.

Being grateful as a duty feels good (or as a habit or as manners), because you are doing the right thing. When you dutifully are grateful, you will notice your mood change for the better without any obvious connection to your enumeration of blessings. It just happens. But the connection is there.

But the actual feeling of gratitude is celestial. I was graced with a few moments of real upwelled gratitude this last week. They were remarkable. We Mormons have a better answer than most Christians do to the question of “what do we do in heaven,” but for all Christians, an excellent answer might be “experience gratitude.” For anyone who has a live recollection of experiencing gratitude, that is answer enough.

(

“I would find living forever boring. Maybe even horrible.”

“You would find it hellish.”

That in a nutshell is the logic of Christianity.)

The scriptures say that fasting should be full of thanksgiving (I’m thinking of D&C 59 here). I have never really found it so, until just in the last few months. I’ve started to fast with an old school attitude as an act of spiritual warfare. It has worked. The feeling of victory has been mixed with tremendous spontaneous gratitude to the giver of victory.

Fasting is a heightened form of prayer. If we can fast as a plea when pleading is prayer is not enough, we can fast in praise and thanksgiving, when praising and thanking in prayer is not enough.