I attended eight family funerals before I finished grade school. Eight times in a pew next to my parents, watching people weep over someone they’d never speak to again. Eight quiet car rides home, watching the world outside keep going as if nothing had happened.
Somewhere in that silence a question rises that doesn’t go away. If this is all there is, what was the point of any of it?
Science has an answer, of sorts. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says every system moves from order to disorder. Bodies age. Relationships fracture. Stars die. Entropy is real, and it is coming for everything you can see.
But Scripture said something first, and it says more. “He has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). That restlessness you feel facing a casket, or a mirror, or a headline, isn’t pessimism. It’s recognition. You were built for something the decay can’t touch, because you were made in the image of a God who doesn’t decay.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). That doesn’t mean you look like Him. It means you carry His eternal nature, His DNA. A soul that wasn’t designed to expire. That’s why death feels wrong. It is wrong. It was never part of the original design, only the interruption of it.
In 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a Nazi prison cell with his future gone and his freedom stripped away. His letters from that cell overflow with gratitude anyway: for a scrap of bread, for sunlight on a wall, for the plain fact that even behind bars, he was still made in the image of God. He understood something most of us miss. Circumstances don’t cancel divine design. Being made in God’s image was never dependent on comfort or freedom to begin with, so prison couldn’t take it from him.
That’s the order most of us have backward. We look for reasons to be grateful and come up empty when the circumstances run out. But gratitude that starts with design instead of circumstances doesn’t run out, because the thing it’s grateful for was never on loan from your situation in the first place.
Not gratitude for what you have. Gratitude for Whose you are.
That’s where Divine Gratitude: Joy Beyond This World starts, and it’s the ground everything else in the book stands on.
