During prayer and Mass we should thank God not just for the small favors of life, not just for the new job, or the answered prayer of a family member, or for help during illness, or for those thousands of other things we ask for, but for life itself. Mass should be one huge display of gratitude for the very fact of existence. It should be a feast of thanks. It should be an acknowledgement. No matter how trying life can become (it's meant as a test), we should always remember that it's followed by eternity. How can we ever thank God enough for creating us in the first place? How could there ever be sufficient gratitude? Nowhere does God show His love so heartily as through the very fact that He created us and allows us to share His Kingdom.

Think about this. Think about this when small troubles hound you. Think of the fact that out of nothing God created your spirit and through the soul manifested it into an earthly body. After earthly life, it will ascend for all time to the spiritual. "You may be sure," the Lord told St. Gertrude, "that regarding one who devoutly assists at Holy Mass, I will send him as many of my saints to comfort him and protect him during the last moments of his life as there will have been Masses which he has heard well."

How can we even comprehend such generosity? If you started to praise God from the very moment of conception and praised Him every waking second for the rest of your life, you would still be praising Him but a little.

Only through infinite generosity did He form us out of what would otherwise have been sheer nothingness.

When we look at it that way, when we see it in the light of eternity, our prayers of thanksgiving flow from the heart. No longer is the responsorial psalm something we repeat like robots. Inside, we feel appreciation and indebtedness. When we contemplate how God not only created us, but then has endured our shortcomings and sent His only begotten Son to suffer for them, our minds our boggled at how He could conceivably put up with us.

During Mass, we live through the birth of Jesus, His life, His death, and His Resurrection, all the while acknowledging the goodness of God.