Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.

“I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

We have all heard that expression. I happen to live with someone who has no feet.

Yet during my decades of marriage to a bilateral amputee, there have been plenty of times when I complained that my feet hurt. I have limped around the house nursing a blister while living with a woman who leans her prosthetic legs next to the nightstand.

You would think that daily reminder supplied all the perspective I needed. It did. Perspective was never the problem. Gratitude was something else.

We live in a culture that has industrialized comparison. Social media serves it to us by the scroll: Someone has more than we do, and someone else has