Gratitude is Vulnerable

In the first line Future Grace, John Piper says (much more articulately) what I have been trying to say about gratitude:

Like most precious things, gratitude is vulnerable. We easily forget that gratitude exists because sometimes things come to us 'gratis'--without price or payment.

Yes, gratitude is vulnerable. That's a much better way to say it. Here's another way, from Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island. I don't think he's accurate on some theological points, but I still find this quotation useful:

As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be 'as gods.' We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complement one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and 'one body,' will we being to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives.