Our children and grandchildren arrived at our house five days before Thanksgiving. On Saturday, I made two trips to the airport. Since then, I’ve made meals, made faces (at our littlest grandkids), made believe, made music, but I haven’t made much space for giving thanks.

But being a thankful person requires more than space. Thankfulness – “gratefulness” is, perhaps, the correct term – requires knowledge. We must know two fundamental truths about God to be grateful. We need not only take hold of these truths; these truths need to begin taking hold of us.

The first is that God is great: An ungrateful spirit testifies against us that our God is too small. He is not the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac. He is not the great and terrible God of Israel, who “is in heaven, and does whatever he pleases” (Psalm 115:3, CSB).

The other of these truths is that God is loving: he pursues the good of his people at all times. Ingratitude testifies that our God is not the one who so loved the world that he gave; he is not the loving God of Calvary. These two fundamental truths about God – that he is strong and loving, great and good – must become part of the fabric of our thinking if we are to be grateful people.

These are truths the Israelites rehearsed year after year. The Psalmist knew them: “One thing God has spoken, two things I have heard: that you, O Lord, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving” (Ps. 62:11-12). The theme of the 136th Psalm is “That you, O Lord, are strong,” and the Psalmist plays that theme again and again. He is: the God of gods and the Lord of lords; he does great wonders; he created the earth, the stars and the sun; he has entered into history and redeemed a people; he has swept away Pharaoh’s army and struck down kings; he gives food to every creature.

He is strong, but he is also loving. If the theme of that psalm is that God is strong, its refrain, which continually alternates with the theme, is: “You are loving.” You, O Lord, are strong; you, O Lord, are loving. Twenty-six times we hear – as if to drill the fact into our heads – that “his love endures forever.”

You may think: “I already know that. I’ve known that as long as I can remember.” But worry and ingratitude testify that we don’t believe it, at least not in the robust and comprehensive way needed. It has not gone from doctrine to practice, from head knowledge to heart knowledge.

We must believe in, rest in, and be saturated in God’s love if we are to become grateful people. To believe in God’s love means to believe that he always seeks our good, in every situation, no matter what. Without this belief to anchor our souls, our gratitude will rise and fall like the wind. God is always working for our good.

But be careful how you define good. By good we usually mean our comfort, our success, or our pleasure. Our good, we think, consists in avoiding unpleasantness and accumulating more money. If we insist on defining good in that way, it will certainly seem that God is not always seeking our good. If God really loved me, I would not be enduring this loss, facing this illness, struggling through this family crisis. I don’t call those things good.

But God is good. Terribly good. His love is demanding: it demands our best when we would be satisfied with our comfort. What is our best? Something beyond imagination: St. John says, “When he appears, we will be like him” (1 John 3:2). Paul writes, “Our light and momentary affliction is working for us an exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17). God is not satisfied with a few years of comfort for us, but an eternity of glory. He is doing something in us that is so big that all creation will be altered by it: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” “Creation itself will be liberated…and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Knowing God’s goodness, Paul does not say, (as we might expect), “We have no present sufferings.” Rather, he says, “I reckon our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us!” (Romans 8:18).

Perhaps what we call “good” is not good enough; but what does God call good? Listen to St. Paul: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:28).

To be conformed to the likeness of his Son is what God calls good. And, somewhere in his heart, it is what every follower of Jesus calls good, too. Nothing, not the worries of life nor the pains of death can rob a man of this good. Everything – life’s joys and sorrows, fears and hurts, misunderstandings and unfair treatment, even death itself – will bring good to the person whose has chosen this for his goal.