Today I am grateful for friends who love me. I have the strangest, most eclectic group of misfit friends I know. I am truly blessed to have not only a great family, but also friends who love me so much I could just cry. Okay, true confession. I do cry a lot. And they still love me.
I am also grateful that last night when I let my Luna dog out and she found a possum, she did not kill it. She carried it around the yard in her mouth, but when it stopped moving, she dropped it and then came in the house. When I went back outside to retrieve the presumably dead possum, the sweet baby had run from the yard. I did a whole sweep of the overgrown grassy areas and found no little pink noses and no little beady eyes. Luna did bring in a whole bunch of mud in her paws and deposited it in my clean and smelling-good sheets.
Finally, I am grateful for anger and sadness and despair and hurt and death and all of those sad things that tear us apart. I don’t love them. They don’t make us comfortable. They don’t make us stronger, as the old adage goes, if they don’t kill us. They don’t make us feel as if everything happens for a reason. They simply make us. Human. Theodicy is the oldest theological question: why is there hurt and pain and dark things in a world that was created good and for people who were created in God’s image and for goodness? We don’t know, is the short answer, but here we are.
In the midst of suffering.
In the midst of pain.
In the midst of the spirit.
God is with us. Friends and family are with us.
We are grateful, and sometimes we are not. But today I am.
Reason Breeds Insanity 
We are grateful, and sometimes we are not – and that is OK
Truth.