On Gratitude as Courage
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
1 Thessalonians 5:18
I have loved the practice of gratitude since I read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts seven years ago. My mom read it, and it changed her life, so she gave it to me to read over my Thanksgiving break my sophomore year of undergrad. It took me until the following spring to finish it, not because the book bored me, but because I needed so much time to chew on the concepts. Even so, I started a gratitude list right away. I named all the things I was thankful for, big and small, good and bad. Here are some excerpts from 2012:
14. A painful break-up.
17. Glitter glue.
32. A sleeping puppy on my bed.
50. A summer of peaceful family time.
I’ve kept these lists on and off since those days — practicing gratitude and contentment and eucharisteo. I practiced turning hard things into grace and turning simple things into grace — all was grace. But it was always a personal practice. Gratitude was always between me and God, never entering into the messy world of community and relationships and people. I never thought to bring it into my outer world until this year, as I read Christine Pohl’s Living into Community and realized that many Christian disciplines are meant to not only transform our personal lives, but also to transform the communities we surround ourselves with.
The first moment I realized how gratitude could go deeper than personal transformation was in a conversation with a friend who had hurt me deeply the year before. He hadn’t meant to hurt me, but it still happened, and I had been working through the painful and slow process of forgiveness ever since. I had been moving into the work of releasing bitterness for some time, but wasn’t seeing much progress, until one day I felt a nudge to go and talk to him. Instead of trying to impress him or compete with him, as I normally would have done, I chose to ask how he was doing, and to express gratitude for the work he did and the man he was becoming — and in this, I experienced a shift. It felt similar to the days when I didn’t want to write a gratitude list, but I did anyways, and felt relieved once I finished. Expressing gratitude within this relationship — for this relationship — allowed me to see past the pain and the heartache for a moment and focus in on what was good and what would last. It was like pulling back the film over a painting and realizing I could see the colors I had been missing. But my gratitude didn’t just change me; it also changed how my friend reacted to me. Because I wasn’t coming to him in contempt or competition, he opened up to me, and we spoke in a way we hadn’t for a long time. My gratitude broke down a wall that had been standing between us, and it was the beginning of my realization that this discipline could change my individual relationships.
Gratitude, then, began to make its way into my corporate understanding of the world around me. I began to see how cynicism and complaining had shaped my view of the spaces I occupied, and how other people’s complaining had shaped me, as well. My church is currently going through a massive transition, the kind where people tend to get anxious and scared and see worst-case-scenarios play out in their heads. It occurred to me that gratitude could not only curb this fear in myself, but also help curb it in the people around me. I began to hear all the negative undertones I used when I spoke of policies or decisions, and I started to cut back. I cut back on cynicism, and I cut back on speaking worst-case-scenarios out loud with people. What happened, then, was that I began to notice how much division complaining could cause. When I cut back on my own grumbling, I began to notice how I didn’t have to accept other’s grumbling. Instead of believing people when they said something negative about someone, I chose to realize, instead, that they were stating an opinion — and probably one that was emotionally charged and embedded in fear or insecurity. I began to realize that I didn’t have to live in the cynical world that I had painted for myself, and that people had painted for me. Gratitude became a mode of liberation.
Of course, gratitude doesn’t fix everything — whether it be personal, relational, or congregational. In fact, the point of gratitude isn’t really to fix anything in the first place. The point of gratitude is to change our perspective. The point of gratitude is to take us back to what matters, and to remind us that, at the end of the day, not many things are worth letting into our souls. We don’t need to let cynicism seep into us. We don’t need to let complaints permeate our spiritual eyesight. What we need right now, as individuals and as communities, are hearts soaked in gratefulness. Grateful hearts extend grace. Grateful hearts see the best in other people. And it is the one who is grateful who in the end will have the endurance and the joy to change the things that truly are worth being angry about in this world. I am not saying that we should be grateful and stay in the status quo — not even close. Complacency is just a synonym for insecurity, but gratitude is courage — and now more than ever, we could use more courage.