Our children’s deployments were in their rearview mirrors. We were chatting, and I asked them if there was something that made them extremely thankful. Ironically, there was something both our son and daughter agreed on: being able to take a shower without shower shoes on.

Talk to any soldier and they’ll tell you the condition of their feet can affect the condition of their days. I would have thought of many things – like dry socks or good boots – before a shoeless shower. The roots of each person’s gratitude often reflect the paths they’ve walked.

Gratefulness is like looking at life through a prism. You turn it a little bit, and you get a different perspective. You turn it more, and the lens with which you view things changes entirely. I imagine most of us have never even thought, “Gee, I take a shower without shoes on.”

Learning about others’ gratefulness can often affect ours. I love hanging around grateful people. It’s contagious. When someone says, “Man, did you see that sunrise this morning?” If I didn’t see the sunrise, it prompts me to take a gander the next morning. Glancing at others’ lives can also inspire our sense of gratitude. Parents of little ones often grow weary of buckling car seats, lifting children into a grocery cart, or dressing their kiddos. Yet, if we see someone helping their teenage child transition from a wheelchair to a vehicle, our grumbling about the temporary phase of a toddler’s car seat can quickly shift to gratitude. More perspective.

Recently, I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Examining life through the story of a person who spent three years in a concentration camp quickly clarifies our definitions of “need to have” and “want to have.” As I read of the atrocities Frankl and others experienced, my gratitude was honed for even the simplest things – fresh air, food, warmth, sleep, and seeing my family. Still more perspective.

As a parent, I would often remind our children that they need not be ashamed of what they have. I didn’t want to be that mom who guilted her kids at the dinner table about broccoli and the starving children in some faraway land that would, no doubt, be grateful for those edible green shrubs. A seven-year-old has a hard time grasping that lecture, which leaves the kids hating broccoli and the mom-tirade that was served with it. Instead, my heart’s cry was to create a consistent stream of gratefulness flowing around us and through us as a family.

During a power outage last year after a horrific storm, I saw a social media post expressing frustration with the power company. Didn’t the power company know that the person grumbling on their account had important things to do in their home, as if others didn’t? My less mature self wanted to engage in the starving-children-broccoli-lecture and apply it to electricity. Instead, I shared a short post thanking the linemen for working in such a cold rain and bitter conditions to restore power to our homes and businesses. I’m not naive. I know one post of gratitude can’t force behavior changes in others. But we can all choose to be a simple, grateful influence in our little corners of the world.

In this season of Thanksgiving, it’s easy to calendar gratefulness. We can sit around the table and share what we’re thankful for on Thursday. However, whether we are genuinely grateful is reflected in what we do on Black Friday when we’re out shopping or how we react when that have-to-have Cyber Monday item is sold out.

Apostle Paul teaches a beautiful lesson about gratitude in all things at all times. In prison, behind the walls, he chose to sing and serve. It wasn’t because that’s what the rules were or because it was what he should do. Instead, Paul modeled gratitude because he framed life from an eternal perspective. Making thanksgiving a way of life, rather than a single day in November, helps us stoke the fires of gratefulness in big and small things – like taking a shower without shower shoes.