Gratitude. It's a current buzz word, though not a new concept. We feel most fulfilled when we give thanks because it's what we were made to do. Our wellness coaches or yoga teachers didn't create this effective habit for our emotional health over the last decade, it was built into us by the Lord!
Gratitude breeds contentment.
Though a child's discontentment is oh-so-easy for me to spot, I can easily gloss over my own entitled heart while correcting my six-year-old daughter's. While pointing out her blessings in the face of discontentment, I see a mirror into my own heart that oftentimes believes the lie that I deserve "so much more."
Quiet reflection around the thanksgiving I see mentioned over and again in the Bible has led me to the realization that it is one of the most powerful testimonies of a deep, abiding faith.
Consider the fruits of the Spirit (Galations 5) when attached to a thankful heart...so much humility! God's upside-down kingdom on full display, especially in the face of suffering.
Love + Thanksgiving
Joy + Thanksgiving
Peace + Thanksgiving
These pairs are stunning testimonies to a security beyond ourselves! That security is other worldly. We know it is Divine.
Thanksgiving, is THE fruit, that says "I trust you, Lord." Thanksgiving is the ultimate megaphone that shows an abiding heart.
I am tired of feeling out of control. Do you feel like there are areas of your life that you are helpless? It is exhausting to play the whack-a-mole of life in trying to maintain faux control. God meets us in that space specifically (I think those are his favorite spaces) and says "I got this. I got you. Rest, beloved."
Rest breeds joy and peace. Joy and peace birth thanksgiving.
It's the only way to have authentic praise when we are smashed in the face with calamity.
What then?
Let us strike the delicate balance between acknowledging feelings that are legitimately painful while being cautious not to over elevate them to a throne that belongs to one, The One.
We are not robotic in digesting life's sorrows and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be. This doesn't make us "bad christians" to get upset when bad things happen to us. We live in brokenness. When sadness strikes, and it will, how do we pour out genuine thanksgiving?
Here are a few potentially helpful ideas, not an exhaustive list, but a good place to start.
1) We grieve. We cry real, wet tears
2) We sit, in person, face to face, with another Christ-follower(s) and let them declare the truth to us that we don't feel to be true
3) We meditate on the character of God, which is forever good and never subject to change
Thanksgiving is most beautiful when it coexists with real grief. You can grieve and be thankful in the God whom you know is trustworthy in all things. You don't have to thank him for the cancer or for the death or for the financial disaster, but you can thank him for who he is in the middle of it all. This is powerful!
"The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me." Psalm 50:23
As I type this out and wrestle through this concept in my own heart I feel like I need a human scenario to help me make this tangible...
I can imagine my daughter crying to me (as she recently did) when her lego castle accidentally got dropped and shattered into dozens of pieces. She had worked on it for hours.
Now what if she could say to me in that moment...
"I am grateful, Mommy, that you love me and I know you will hold me while I cry about this. I am so sad about this. You bought me this in the first place, how kind and generous you are. I know you care. You have stopped cooking dinner to hold me because you love me; I know that, Mommy. I love you."
That is a heart-attitude of thanksgiving in the midst of grief. If my daughter said this to me I would be so deeply moved. She doesn't have to say "Thank you my Lego broke!" That would be weird. She didn't want it to break in the first place. But she rests in my love for her as she grieves the loss of it and this grounds her.
Can you see this concept with me?
So it is with us, as we interact with the Lord in our disappointments, our looking in His face grounds us and we can be thankful. We can offer him real praise (for his heart towards us) no matter what is going on around us. This is authentic worship!
“Elisabeth Elliot knew that true maturity, joy, and contentment has less to do with a mechanistic assessment of God’s plan, and more to do with being pushed, and, at times, shoved, against the breast of your Savior. Not a tidy, orderly list, but an earnest grappling with the angel of the Lord. When affliction decimates you, then you understand Elisabeth’s doctrine: the Bible’s answers are never to be separated from the God of the Bible. That rich truth then guided me through more than fifty years of paralysis, pain, and cancer”
Suffering is Never For Nothing
-Joni Eareckson Tada viii
Thanksgiving births contentment, peace, and rest. Entitlement births a grumbling spirit.
Where are our hearts today?
“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18.
Thoughts to ponder...
1) Where is your heart particularly tempted to live entitled?
2) What can you offer to the Lord as your sacrifice of praise today?
3) In a culture that tells me repeatedly that "it is all about me" how can we be intentional to live like we believe what Jesus says regarding the first being last and the last first? (Matthew 19:30)
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