When I open my eyes to thanksgiving, everything changes. What once seemed ordinary transforms into extraordinary blessing. Challenges reveal hidden gifts. Difficult people become teachers. Loss creates deeper appreciation for what remains. This shift in perspective from entitlement to gratitude, from complaint to praise represents one of life’s most powerful transformations.
Mattese Lecque, retired Major with the United States Army Reserves, understands this transformation intimately. Military service, healthcare work, personal loss, and spiritual growth taught her to see with grateful eyes even when circumstances seemed bleak. Her journey from taking blessings for granted to recognizing abundance in every moment offers guidance for anyone seeking more grateful living.
Through Mattese’s perspective, opening your eyes to thanksgiving becomes not just seasonal sentiment but daily practice that transforms how you experience every aspect of life.
What Does It Mean to Open Your Eyes?
The phrase suggests awakening from spiritual blindness. We walk through life with eyes that see but don’t truly perceive. We have blessings we never notice, take for granted gifts others pray to receive, and complain about inconveniences while ignoring abundance surrounding us.
Seeing Beyond Surface Reality
When Mattese opens her eyes to thanksgiving, she sees beyond surface appearances to deeper truths. The deployment that separated her from family also protected freedoms she cherished. The difficult patient who challenged her healthcare skills taught lessons that served thousands of others. The personal loss that broke her heart also deepened her capacity for empathy and faith.
This deeper vision recognizes that gratitude doesn’t require perfect circumstances it requires eyes willing to see blessings present even in difficulty.
Awakening from Entitlement
Modern culture encourages entitlement the belief that we deserve comfort, success, and happiness without effort or sacrifice. This mindset blinds us to the extraordinary nature of ordinary blessings.
When we truly open our eyes to thanksgiving, entitlement dissolves. Running water becomes a marvel. Food on the table represents countless people’s labor. Freedom to worship reflects sacrifices by generations of service members. Health, even imperfect health, appears as precious gift rather than assumed right.
Mattese’s Journey to Grateful Seeing
Mattese’s path to opening her eyes to thanksgiving involved profound experiences that shattered complacency and revealed life’s true treasures.
Military Service Perspective
Twenty-six years in the United States Army Reserves taught Mattese to see blessings others miss. Holidays spent away from family highlighted how precious those gatherings are. Austere conditions during service created appreciation for basic comforts. Witnessing sacrifice by fellow service members revealed the cost of freedoms most take for granted.
Military service forced her to open her eyes to thanksgiving for safety, peace, family connection, and freedom blessings that become visible primarily when threatened or absent.
Healthcare Insights
As a Physician’s Assistant, Mattese witnessed how quickly health can change and how devastating illness impacts families. Patients facing terminal diagnoses often experienced awakening suddenly seeing clearly what mattered most, expressing gratitude for relationships and experiences they’d previously taken for granted.
These experiences taught her not to wait for crisis to open her eyes to thanksgiving. Why delay grateful living until loss threatens? Why not see blessings clearly now while they’re present?
Personal Loss and Growth
Mattese’s journey through grief, explored in her work, forced confrontation with what remains when something precious is lost. She emphasizes the process of grief and how to not succumb to depression, teaching that loss paradoxically can deepen gratitude.
When grief opened her eyes to thanksgiving, she saw more clearly the value of time shared, words spoken, love expressed. Loss taught her that nothing is guaranteed making every blessing, however small, worthy of conscious gratitude.
The Faith Foundation of Grateful Seeing
Mattese’s book “You Can’t Make Me Doubt Him” reveals the spiritual foundation enabling her to open her eyes to thanksgiving even through trials.
Recognizing Divine Provision
Faith enables seeing blessings as gifts from a loving God rather than random occurrences or personal achievements. This perspective transforms gratitude from polite courtesy to spiritual practice acknowledging the Source of every blessing.
When you open your eyes to thanksgiving through faith, you recognize that breath itself is gift, that sunrise occurs by divine design, that capacity for love reflects being created in God’s image. Everything becomes cause for praise.
Trusting Through Difficulty
Faith also enables maintaining grateful perspective through hardship. When circumstances seem bleak, faith assures that God works all things together for good, that present suffering serves greater purpose, that divine provision continues even when invisible.
Mattese’s unwavering faith, demonstrated through her active service as Trustee Board Officer at Saint Peter’s AME Church in North Charleston, sustains her ability to open her eyes to thanksgiving regardless of circumstances.
Practical Ways to Open Your Eyes
Transforming perspective from entitled to grateful requires intentional practice. Mattese’s experience suggests several approaches.
Morning Gratitude Practice
Before your feet touch the floor each morning, identify three specific blessings. Not generic gratitude “I’m thankful for family” but specific recognition: “I’m grateful my daughter called last night,” “I appreciate that my body allowed me restful sleep,” “I’m thankful for the roof protecting me from last night’s storm.”
This practice trains your eyes to see blessings immediately upon waking, setting grateful tone for the entire day.
Reframe Challenges
When facing obstacles, pause and ask: “What blessing hides within this challenge? What am I learning? How might this difficulty serve my growth or others’ benefit?”
Mattese teaches that you can overcome obstacles regardless of circumstances. Part of overcoming involves seeing challenges as opportunities for growth, lessons, and developing resilience all worthy of gratitude.
Express Appreciation
Don’t just feel grateful express it. Thank the grocery clerk, tell your family member you appreciate them, write notes expressing gratitude to people who’ve impacted your life.
Expressed gratitude reinforces grateful seeing while blessing others. Through her community work including Chairperson of the Burke Foundation for Student Enrichment and Mentoring, Mattese demonstrates how expressed appreciation strengthens communities.
Practice “Thank You” Prayers
Throughout the day, offer simple prayers: “Thank you for this meal,” “Thank you for this friendship,” “Thank you for strength to face this challenge.” These brief prayers keep your eyes focused on blessings rather than complaints.
Keep Gratitude Journal
Each evening, record specific blessings you noticed that day. Reviewing past entries reveals patterns of provision you might otherwise miss and trains your eyes to actively seek blessings throughout each day.
What Happens When You Open Your Eyes
The transformation that occurs when you truly open your eyes to thanksgiving affects every aspect of life.
Relationships Deepen
Grateful people appreciate others rather than taking them for granted. When you see loved ones as blessings rather than fixtures, you treasure time with them, express affection more freely, and resolve conflicts more graciously.
Contentment Increases
Gratitude is contentment’s foundation. When you see what you have rather than fixating on what you lack, satisfaction increases regardless of circumstances. This doesn’t mean complacency but rather peaceful appreciation that enables pursuing growth from stable foundation rather than desperate striving.
Resilience Strengthens
Grateful people weather hardship better because they recognize that difficulty doesn’t eliminate all blessings it just shifts focus. When you maintain eyes open to thanksgiving through trials, you see resources, support, and strength you might otherwise miss.
Faith Deepens
Gratitude fuels worship. When you recognize every blessing as divine gift, your heart naturally turns toward the Giver in praise. Mattese’s deepening faith throughout her life correlates directly with her growing capacity for gratitude.
Legacy Builds
People remember grateful individuals who appreciated rather than criticized, who celebrated blessings rather than complained about lacks. When you open your eyes to thanksgiving, you model perspective others want to emulate.
Through her work with Charleston County Park & Recreation Commission and her educational advocacy, Mattese demonstrates how grateful leaders inspire grateful communities.
Overcoming Barriers to Grateful Seeing
Several obstacles can prevent opening your eyes to thanksgiving. Recognizing them helps overcome their influence.
Comparison Culture
Social media and advertising constantly show what others have, making your blessings seem inadequate. Combat this by limiting exposure to comparison triggers and deliberately focusing on your unique gifts rather than others’ advantages.
Entitlement Mindset
Believing you deserve more than you have blinds you to blessings you’ve received. Recognize that every good thing is gift, not entitlement. You didn’t earn breath, sunrise, or love they’re given freely.
Pain and Difficulty
Suffering can make gratitude seem impossible. Yet Mattese’s message that you can overcome obstacles includes learning to see blessings even through tears. Pain and gratitude can coexist acknowledging hurt while recognizing gifts that remain.
Busyness
Rushing through life prevents noticing blessings. Deliberately slow down, create margin, and make space for reflection that enables seeing clearly.
Conclusion: The Transformation of Grateful Vision
When I open my eyes to thanksgiving, as Mattese Lecque teaches, life transforms from burden to gift, ordinary to extraordinary, complaint to praise. This shift doesn’t require circumstances to change
it requires perspective to shift.
Mattese’s life demonstrates this truth. Military service taught her gratitude for peace and freedom. Healthcare work revealed blessings of health and healing. Personal loss deepened appreciation for what remains. Faith provided foundation for seeing divine provision in everything.
Her memoir “The Make-Over: Re-imagining & Recreating Myself” describes transformation through renewed perspective. Opening your eyes to thanksgiving represents perhaps the most powerful transformation available changing not your circumstances but your experience of those circumstances.
This Thanksgiving season and beyond, practice opening your eyes. Look for blessings you’ve overlooked. Recognize gifts you’ve taken for granted. Express gratitude to people you’ve neglected to thank. See challenges as opportunities for growth worthy of appreciation.
The world you see when you open your eyes to thanksgiving is the same world you inhabited before but transformed by grateful vision into place of abundance, blessing, and divine provision at every turn.
Open your eyes. See blessings. Give thanks. Transform your life through grateful vision.
