The great Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, once said: "Most of us spend our lives building mansions for ourselves and in the end we choose to live in the dog house." The dog house instead of the God house. We work hard all of our lives and we end up being grouches and grumps because we don't have the grace to be grateful -- we build mansions and live in the dog house of ingratitude.

I want to tell you what gratitude is about. Gratitude is the happiness we feel when we know that someone has loved us enough to give us a real gift. It's as simple as that. Gratitude is happiness and happiness is gratitude. So the main thing we really need to know about how to be grateful is how to recognize a real gift when we get it.

You see, a gift is not something you get for nothing. You can end up paying through the nose for things you get for nothing. I am going to tell you five ways to recognize a real gift when you get one.

First of all, a real gift always has a person attached to it. When you get a real gift there is always a real person who comes with it, saying to you that she wants to be part of your life. Take my gift, and you take me with it.

My wife and I came home one night and found a parcel on our front porch that had come in the mail. We opened it up and found in it a beautiful white afghan, six feet long. Now, if you knew how tall I was, you would know that that afghan had to be made just for me. There was a note attached to it, and the note read, "Every inch stitched with love. (Every inch stitched with love!) Signed, Sue Van Lenten." Sue Van Lenten was a wonderful woman who had been a member of my parish in New Jersey over forty years ago. She made that afghan for me and gave it to me as a way of saying to me, "Take this gift into your life, and take me with it." And I never look at or use that gift without enjoying the happines of gratitude I feel for Sue Van Lenten.

A real gift has a person attached. This, by the way, is the insight of personal faith. When you take a breath of fresh air, when you look at a red rose, or a maple leaf in October, when you feel the touch of somebody's loving finger on your arm, remember you're getting a gift with a divine person attached.

And now, the second way to tell a real gift when you get one. It's this: The greatest gifts come in plain wrappers.

One reason we've lost the happiness of gratitude is that we've gotten too used to miracles. We don't see how extraordinary the ordinary things are. We've grown accustomed to the unaccountable.

I came home one night and for fun I said to my wife: "An amazing thing happened to me today."

"What was it?" she asked.

I said, "I told my left leg to move, and it actually moved."

Yes, whenever you tell your leg or your finger to move and it does what you tell it to do, you are performing an astounding neurological miracle. Nobody has ever been able to explain how a notion in your brain becomes a motion of your body.

Not long ago, I got up off my chair to give a lecture to a hall full of students. And when I stood up, I told my left leg to start moving and take me up to the platform. But my left leg refused to budge. It seemed to say to me: "No thanks. I'm staying put. I've done what you've told me to do all these years, but this time I'm not moving."

Well, you can guess what had happened. I had suffered a slight stroke. A tiny fleck of blood had broken loose from a heart valve and gotten itself clogged in a crevice of the motor area of my brain. That happens now and then. But most of the time we don't get blood clots and we don't have strokes and our left leg does precisely what we tell it to do. What a miracle -- a neurological miracle -- it's happening every time your body does what you tell it to do. A wondrous gift in ordinary wrapping.

And now, the third mark of a real gift. A real gift is always a risk to give.

There's always the possibility that the person you give the gift to won't like it. Here's a letter to Ann Landers that appeared in our newspaper:

Ann Landers answered:

So, when you get a real gift, you know that the person who gave it took a chance that you might sell his gift in a garage sale. What a chance God takes with his gifts. He knows that some of us are not going to be grateful, and no matter how many gifts he gives us, he takes the chance and keeps on giving. It makes you grateful when you know that somebody took a chance on whether you would like the gift or not.

Let me recall the first three marks I've given you of a real gift: First, it has a person attached. Second, great gifts come in plain wrappers. And third, a gift is always a risk to take.

Which leads me, now, to the fourth way to tell a real gift when you get it. A real gift costs nothing to get.

A real gift does not obligate you. When you get a real gift you never have to say: I owe you one. A gift is not bait that hides a hook to catch you on. You never have to pay for a real gift.

Some people believe that everything we get has a price tag. They are blind -- stone blind -- to the fact that every raindrop falling on the soil, every bud growing on a bush, every breath of air we take in our lungs, every thought that pops into our heads, every sound of music that fills the air, every letter from an old friend, every experience of being forgiven for something bad we've done -- everyone of them is a sheer gift, and we didn't pay a red cent for any of them.

And that brings me to the fifth and final mark of a real gift: A real gift costs something to give. It costs nothing to get, but it costs something to give.

Maybe it costs time to find it, maybe it costs effort to make it, or money to buy it, but it does cost the giver something. Some of the trash collectors in Beverly Hills, California, pick up a lot of wonderful items at the curb that rich people throw away in their trash. They're getting something for nothing, but it's not a gift -- not a real gift -- because it didn't cost those people anything to give.

God's greatest gift cost him everything. Whenever you see the simple sign of a cross, you can remember what it cost him to give us his greatest gift of love and forgiveness.

Well, there you have the five marks of a real gift: A real gift comes with a person attached. A real gift is a risk to give. A real gift may come in a plain wrapper. A real gift costs nothing to get. A real gift costs something to give.

Let me go back to the beginning. The most profound discovery we can ever make about life is that happiness comes by being grateful for the gifts we get. What Kierkegaard said is all too true, I fear: some of us spend our lives building mansions for ourselves and when we get them built, we choose to live in the dog house -- the dog house of ingratitude.

But you don't want to live, and I don't want you to live in the dog house of ingratitude. If I had one gift to give you, I think it would be the gift of gratitude because I know that to be grateful is to be happy. But I can't give you this gift. I cannot give it to you. This is a gift you must give to yourself.

Interview with Lewis Smedes
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Lewis, you say in your earlier message that gratitude is the happiness we feel when someone we love gives us a real gift. I suspect that has a great deal to do with the soul, giving from the soul.

Lewis Smedes: I think so and it's perhaps even more, receiving from the soul, having the perception that some things are a sheer gift. May I tell you when I discovered the reality of gratitude being equivalent to happiness? I'll try to make it short, but it was so great.

I was on sabbatical up in Minnesota with my wife, and it was getting to be Christmas time, and we were ready to go home. The night before we packed, I had spent an uncomfortable night, and wasn't well the next morning and my wife, Doris, went out into the snow to call a doctor, and she came back and she found me lying up belly-up on the kitchen floor. Well, they got me to the hospital in St. Cloud where I tilted in the direction of death for about four days.

And, I remember waking up and a Lake Wobegon-type physician, a wonderful man by the name of Hans Engman, leaned over me and said, "Congratulations. You have just recovered from something more deadly than the most deadly heart attack conceivable." I had had a bunch of blood clots in my lungs. Okay. I said, "Thanks," and went back to sleep because I hadn't been thinking about dying, and I wasn't impressed by being alive, but a couple of night later in the calm and melancholy of a hospital floor at about 2:00 a.m. something happened to me. It was as if I had been seized, just grabbed by the miracle of being alive, and it wasn't having beaten the odds. They said it was twenty to one odds against my living. I wasn't thinking about that. It just struck me that any moment, any instant of being alive is a fantastic wonder, and my hands went up -- I say to my evangelical friends, "I became an instant closet charismatic." I was just possessed, and it was that time that I discovered that being grateful and being happy are one in the same thing, because in sheer gratitude you experience the best feeling that you will ever have in your life.

Talbot:  At a moment when it was almost cut off. Well, I suspect that kind of receptivity was felt by your wife, Doris, at a birthday party when she knew the meaning of a real gift from your soul. You have to tell that.

Smedes:  Oh, you're going to bring that up, aren't you? I had been telling you that last Saturday -- two days ago, three days ago -- was my wife's seventieth birthday, and I put on a party. My wife has always been a party giver; I'm not much of a party man, but I put on a big party. And I composed a song for her, and here is a guy who cannot carry a tune in a bushel basket -- or a freight train, for that matter -- getting up in front of all those people and singing my song.

Talbot: Gifts come in so many different forms. One of them comes in the form of hope, which is something that your family knows about. Your son, John.

Smedes:  Yes. Hope. Hope! You can't live without it. The biggest challenge in all the world today is to give hope to people who don't have it, because without hope you atrophy, you die. Every creative, every good thing has come because people got the power of hope.

Talbot: Now you discovered the meaning of that, though, when you thought that your son, John, had a fatal blood disease.

Smedes:  My son, John, has a genetic disease called Gaucher's disease and without much to look forward to. Two and a half years ago, they discovered a synthetic enzyme. It doesn't cure the disease but it helps people live with it. Before that time, he never expected to live very long. After that time, he had hope -- hope! -- and hope transformed his life. Hope gave him something to work for. You see, hope is what you have when the world doesn't give you evidence that your hope can come true, but when you get hope, you get the power to make it come true.

Talbot:  In our final moment I must ask you, as a student in your earlier days you recognized hypocrisy in religious faith at an early age. What led you to the kind of communion experience today that gives you meaning and hope.

Smedes:  That's a question I have never thought about before, but let me try to tell you what I think it was. I discovered a community where I have worked for the last twenty-six years, Fuller Theological Seminary, and I have never been a part of a community that accepted you for what you are and allowed you to explore the outer ramifications of your religious faith without being afraid that thinking is going to hurt your faith. That's the discovery I made. Even doubting can be part of believing. That's a great gift and I am thankful for that.

Talbot: And transforming.

Smedes:  And transforming.