There are songs, poems, books, movies, etc. about love. It has been described every way that you can describe it. Yet, because of love, we have gratitude, and without gratitude, love would be something far less than it is.
Gratitude is the flip-side of love. The Ying to the Yang of love. One motivates the other. This is true in the microcosm of a relationship and in the macrocosm of what we have been given in this world by God.
Within a relationship, be it romantic, platonic, with relatives or even strangers, love provides the motivation for the giving to another and gratitude is the response to that giving. Imagine that love is the sun that gives warmth and light to a flower. Gratitude is the flower's response by growing into what it was meant to be.
Just like us, when we realize the love we receive from another, we grow into appreciation and gratitude as we realize the power and wonder of that love. It may be said that those expressions of love would not last very long if we were never grateful for them.
Within the world, sometimes we come to a place where we realize the true depth and grandeur of what we have right now. Again, everything we have right now was given to us by God. For some of these, we received it through God working within our friends, family, community, etc. Just like in relationships, we respond with the realization that these are gifts of grace, expressions of the love of the universe (God) for us. Gratitude we feel for these gifts completes the other side of love, and moves us and motivates us out of that gratitude to once again send out love.
Therefore, gratitude and love are two parts of an endless cycle. Love creates gratitude that promotes another act of love that creates gratitude and so on. It is true that we love because we have been loved. The missing and often forgotten component between those two expressions of love is gratitude.
Be grateful.
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