Thoughts on Thankfulness

The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who
orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God.
Psalm 50:23

I know I said in my last blog post that next time I would write more on living reflectively, and I do want to get back to that, but the topic of thankfulness has been impressed upon me so much lately that I wanted to share a few thoughts with you.

This thought came to me this morning as I was getting ready for the day: Don't wait to feel thankful to say thank you. I suppose we can (and we do) wait if we choose to, but for many of us, that would mean waiting a very long time. And I don't mean saying a half-hearted thank you merely out of habit because we were taught that it's proper manners to do so. I mean, deep, heartfelt gratitude offered ultimately to God, but also spilling over into the lives of all we encounter.

Thankfulness is cultivated in the every day, mundane details of our lives. Though there are reasons to give thanks all around us, sometimes certain seasons may require a little extra mining of our circumstances to trace the hand of God and see his goodness abounding. We must train our eyes and hearts to see. There are myriads of distractions to keep us from learning to do this, and by distractions I don't simply mean things that make us look another direction, but detrimental things that keep us from being thankful--things like envy and comparison. Always, always there will be someone who has more or better things than us. And alway, always there will be people who appear to be happier, smarter, prettier/ handsomer and who seem to have better relationships with their spouses, more well behaved children, and the list goes on. If we make whatever other people have or appear to have, the standard for thankfulness in our lives, we will forever be drowning in a sea of discontentment. Our hearts are so prone to envy in others what we do not have, so prone to complaining, negativity, and discontentment, that these other weeds will quickly choke out any seeds of thankfulness and joy in our hearts. There's a reason the hymn writer wrote, "Tune my heart to sing Thy praise." Our hearts all too easily get out of tune. Again, if we wait for them to magically tune themselves, we will be waiting a very long time. Meanwhile, our hearts will become so overgrown by envy and negativity that despair will easily overtake us, and like the writer of Ecclesiastes, we will have difficulty seeing meaning in anything. "All is vanity!" we will cry.

So, like the hymn writer, we must pray, "Tune my heart, Lord! I know I have reason to praise you, but all I feel is the heavy weight of life bearing down upon me. All I see is the evil and injustice of this world, and it seems like everything I desire, you give to others and not to me. Help me, Lord! My heart is out of tune; tune it once again to give you praise." And then we wait. But we don't wait passively. We begin to give thanks--for anything and everything that comes to mind. We do our part to tune our hearts, even as it may feel forced, and we wait for him to transform us from grumblers into the most thankful people we know. And it is in thankfulness that we will meet him, for how can we truly walk in fellowship with our Father when we are blinded to his goodness and love because of our ungrateful spirits? How can we follow a Savior who became a servant and emptied himself for our sakes if we constantly feel entitled to life on our terms? Oh, friends, I want to know him and follow him and I know I can't do it with the baggage of ungratefulness, envy, and discontentment. He is worthy of my worship, awe, and deepest, most profound thanks. Would you join me in this fierce fight to be a thankful people?

Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”

Hosea 6:3