Sometimes I think I would be quite a decent person if I could just shut my brain off.

I assume that’s where the voice resides, constantly churning out that inner dialogue that clogs my head and embitters my heart. Take, for instance, a Sunday morning fresh with the coolness of spring, The Husband beside me, music lifting the air around us, voices raised in unison, and I? I can’t stop glaring at the woman who persists in making her voice loudest, her hands raised highest, her solitary comments punctuating announcements and sermon. And the thoughts fill my brain, courtesy of the inner voice: judgments on her insincerity, her insecurity, her need to be noticed. And then…a new Voice. Sending reminders to my heart of all the times I’ve perceived myself unloved, underappreciated, treated unfairly–and acted accordingly. Of all the times I’ve been wrong, about myself and others. And I realize it won’t hurt anyone if I, each Sunday morning, start assuming the best about this woman.

Easier said than done. But that’s where it comes in that this gratitude, it is not just a game. Or an exercise in optimism, a glass-half-full, Pollyanna technique. It is both warfare and triumph, it both wields weapons and releases grips. And it just might save me.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t appraising my surroundings, all too often the people in those surroundings, and assessing worth. Perpetual student that I was, this was the currency in which I traded: do work, receive evaluation. I never got the memo that the classroom has a door, that it doesn’t extend to all corners of the earth, that people (including myself) are not made to be scored. I didn’t get that my value had nothing to do with anything I had done.

But tell that to the girl who got the second-best scholarship, who waxed up a mediocre molar, who travels among the machines at the gym prepared to defend the number of reps she completed to roving trainers. My defensiveness patrols my perimeter, ready to snap at expressed judgment, even as I dole it out silently. My excuse list is always ready.

And that’s where grace and its heavenly cousin gratitude come in.

Every time I abandon the shaking head, the “no”, for thanks, my judgment is converted to joy. Gratitude combats my inner dialogue of negativity at every point. It’s not just a mood-lifter, oh hell no. It is pure transformation, one moment at a time. It turns caricatures into personalities, snark into narrative. It makes the world bigger than I imagined, more than I can handle. Better than I dreamed. In sweeping broadstrokes, it demolishes my scoring system and creates art where I stand. I am surrounded by beauty I never saw before.

And I realize that it’s not the world’s bad news that keeps me from the whispered thank you, nor is it my own inability to say the words. All that separates me from them is faith, faith that there can be beauty rather than decay in everything from a stubbed toe to a searing loss, faith that there is more to the story than I can see from where I stand. Faith that there is another Voice, a truer one, subject not to the whims of this world or my mood, a Voice that knows and has seen everything and what’s more, can thread it all together into a masterpiece. Gratitude is another word for grace, another word for faith, another word for hope and love, and it knows which Voice to listen to.