Gratitude

So I got another batch of Sunday afternoon homework. This one stemmed out of the fact that I was asked to speak in church on gratitude. I asked a friend for advice and this was his response:

I am afraid I have no good advice for a talk on gratitude, except--wait!--here is an idea I was mulling over earlier.
Heavenly Father never says "thank you".
That one startled me the first time I thought about it; it still does, actually. It makes perfect sense when you think about it for a lot of reasons, starting with what would He thank us for? But it also points up how much gratitude we owe him, since our position is the perfect reciprocal of His; viewed correctly, we ought to thank Him for pretty much everything (I am not quite sure about thanking Him for other people's sins, or our own, but we certainly ought to thank Him for our weaknesses, as Ether 12 points out).

I'm not going to lie. When I read this comment this morning, my head nearly exploded. I've been thinking about it all day. This is more or less what I have come up with. (Here comes the bullet list...)
* He really doesn't say 'Thank You'. I'm mind-boggled. I think the closest thing we get is 'Well done thou good and faithful servant'. We do get blessings though. I suppose He could thank us for our obedience, but really...the blessings come because we comply with the stipulated guidelines.
* When I was a teenager in Sunday school, my teacher taught us a lesson on service. He was feeling very blessed one day and decided that he wanted to thank the Lord for all of his blessing and tried to decide exactly how he could go about doing that. He decided to work at the church farm one Saturday to pay back the Lord for the good feeling that he had when he served others. He soon found out that the harder he worked, the more he felt that good feeling and realized that he could never pay the Lord back for that good feeling.
* PAY IT FORWARD. One of my roommates had to watch the movie for one a class and I ended up watching it with them. Great concept. Receive favors or help and rather than paying it back, pay it forward and help someone else who needs it.
Gratitude is one of the most beautiful feelings that we can have as mortals. It allows us to humble ourselves and acknowledge the blessings that we do have and where they come from. My talk is supposed to be based off of Helping Others Recognize the Whisperings of the Spirit by Sister Matsumori. I'm looking forward to re-reading and studying this talk and realizing that really, my level of gratitude truly affects the level of the spirit in my life.

Addendum: Gotta love the hometeachers. They shared this quote from E' Uchtdorf and I thought it applied. ish. Good luck thinking like I do.
" No, God does not need us to love Him. But oh, how we need to love God!"