I stood, looking at 70 women creating gratitude jars at a UWFaith soul care retreat. Talking, laughing, trading stickers and ribbons, going back to the resource room for more. No one questioned why we’d asked them to make the jars. Seasoned spiritual seekers, they knew the blessing of gratitude.

Earlier that morning as we’d unloaded boxes of Mason jars, it brought me back to the long summer hours spent years ago with Granny, my mother’s mom, gathering vegetables and picking fruit—reaping nature’s goodness from her garden. We gathered early in the day. In the afternoons we’d wash, pare, chop, snap, dice, and peel the day’s take, storing the food for the next step, putting the food into jars.

For me, this process of canning became a beloved summer ritual. Even before we started collecting from the garden, we’d bring jars from previous years in from the garage and check for flaws in the lids. Lids that leaked or were discolored could be deadly. We’d count the number of pint and quart jars in light of what we would need that year. A lot of swapping sizes went on between Granny and women friends and family. We prepped the jars and pots while pressure cookers of fruits and vegetables boiled, steamed, and simmered on the stove. Sometimes we pickled beets and cucumbers. Finally, we’d fill the jars with food that would nourish us throughout the year. What I wouldn’t give now for a jar of Granny’s peach preserves.

 Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, this ritual of the jars fed my soul, for it wasn’t merely a task of storing food that would fill my tummy. It was the love that deepened between grandmother and granddaughter as we worked together. It was the stories she told of her childhood and the ones her Scots Irish grandmother had passed along to her. It was her humming old hymns from her youth while we shelled and cooked bushels of blackeye peas. It was playing with cousins when my aunt came to swap jar sizes and taking time to sit for a visit. It was eating the canned fresh-from-the-garden green beans with my family at Thanksgiving. It was my grandfather saying grace before every meal, thanking God for the bounty of the food set before us and God’s never-ending bounty of love and care.

As I watched the women creating their gratitude jars at the retreat, I thought about them taking the jars home, filling them with written messages of gratitude, then reliving the love and joy later as they returned to the messages at some later date, feeding their souls with gratitude. It was the same act of love as Granny and me filling our jars by first receiving the bounty of the garden, then later taking the food from the jars to nourish our family, always with gratitude for God’s bountiful blessings.

 Some seventy years later, as I come to the end of writing this story that I pulled from the overflowing jar in my heart, I still feel the same gratitude to God that I felt then. It remains fresh, filling my soul with the same love that I felt all those years ago with Granny, the garden, and the jars.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving!

-- Karen Kaigler-Walker
Horizon Texas Conference Spiritual Growth & Soul Care Coordinator

*Adapted from Karen Kaigler-Walker, “Jars of Gratitude,” House of Gratitude. Gretchin Martin (ed). Dallas: Village of Care Press. 2024. Pp 7-10.