The Not-So-Thin Thread of Thankfulness

It was just the other day when I caught a glimpse of it, in that still moment of reflection when someone asked, just before the turkey and sweet potato casserole, “So, what are you thankful for?” Truth be told, at the moment of hunger? Not so thankful for questions about thankfulness!

But it is good to be slowed down ... I am too often in a hurry. Taste your food, and savor it. Make more room for these "Consider the lilies" moments. And so I do...

And soon, thankful thoughts begin to race like wildfire. Faces appear, some right in front of me, others from the not-so-distant past – both smiling, and weeping. It is a privilege that I am here at all, I think; to experience this life of joys and sorrows - it is a gift. That too, is grace.

Now as I sit here, days from Thanksgiving, typing thoughts and words and dreams with the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s What Child is This? keeping time with my tapping, I consider, How strange that that one small question about thankfulness can bring a sense that, in gratitude, I am “getting warmer, warmer,” like the children’s game when you’re closing in on the hidden prize. It’s so easy to be in a hurry; add to that, to become jaded about this life, and revert to the status-quo of criticism and the pretended wisdom of the cynic ... it all thwarts this desired gratitude.

Thankfully, a Christmas carol jolts me back to the warmer place, leaving behind the “always winter, but never Christmas” hopelessness that Lewis described. Ahh, there it is again - Christmas working backwards, to put the real thanks into “Thanks-giving.”

Surprised by Gratitude

But of course, it makes no sense at all to be thankful if you’ve been operating from the assumption (maybe even the desired belief) that there really is no one there to say thanks to, right? I remember hearing how the great writer G.K. Chesterton was surprised by this fact, and at a moment in his life when faith still eluded him…

As the story goes, while out strolling one day, he “happened upon” two aspiring artists on the river bank, poised at their easels. Brushes in hand, they attempted to capture the serene beauty of the landscape – for it was a stunningly beautiful day. Pausing to watch them paint, Chesterton could not help notice how their conversation seemed strangely out-of-place, for despite the overwhelming beauty before them, they were filled with complaining. Oddly, and in marked contrast, he found his own heart wanting to say “thank-you” to someone. Beauty, after all, had smote his heart, and it must be acknowledged. But where was this strange sense of gratitude coming from, he wondered? And to whom could it possibly be directed? Chesterton would later say that from that moment onward, he began to hold on to faith by “the thin thread of thankfulness.”

Ann's Story

For years, Ann Voskamp struggled to see any reason for thankfulness at all. At 4 years of age (her earliest memory), she watched as her 18 month-old sister Aimee, the little sister with the silken hair, was crushed in their driveway by a farm truck. Her mother saw it too, watching in helpless horror from the kitchen window. Later, Ann observed how a cloud of despair set in upon her and her family, a winter chill that would not depart. From that moment, her father abandoned faith. And by the time she was in college, Ann was on anti-depressants and suffered with a fear of almost everything (agoraphobia).

It’s painful for me to write these things. I’m reminded of my own family’s suffering - my sister’s ongoing struggle to live life in a wheelchair after a car accident at 17, and dad's cancer. How do you take a risk on love again when you’ve been cut so deeply? And just how do you unclench your fists and open your heart to even the possibility of God – let along a good God who doesn’t deal in cruel jokes and seemingly senseless pain – when you've experienced such great losses? What is God up to?

Love will avoid the easy answers, the “buck up and bear it” or “God works all things for good” response that attempts to make it all go away (so we don’t have to feel it), or explain it with a self-righteous platitude. No, let mystery be mystery, and learn to weep with those who weep is the first order of business.

But there is more. One of the profound things such pain produced in Ann Voskamp’s life was to one day awaken her heart to the suggestion and challenge of a friend: create a list of 1,000 things you are thankful for. In starting, Ann realized something vital: If I am to really do this, I must begin with “the little gifts” of each day. The colors in a soap bubble as she washed the dishes. Children building a snow-fort, making a door in the side. The falling of leaves from an oak. New toothbrushes. Nylons without runs.… (I will leave the rest of the list for you to read and discover yourself! Put her book One Thousand Gifts on your Christmas wish-list. You'll be thankful you did!)

How Gratitude Can Change Us

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.~  Sarah Ban Breathnach

Gratitude is the natural response when we begin to understand grace. And while on some days it seems so impossible to find, it has a way of transforming us as we follow it back to a loving God's hand. As Ann writes, 

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy ,when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. 

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest light to the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.”

What is this dare to write down a thousand "thank-yous?" Try it - start with just ten or twenty - and you will see what Ann herself discovered about our hearts: “Something always comes to fill the empty places. And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me…” What then is the real beauty behind the list? “It is really a dare to name all the ways that God loves me…” To bow before His wisdom, and to see who He really is. All that He has done, and has promised. And all because a greater gift has been given...

“On the night he was betrayed,  the Lord Jesus took some bread… and giving thanks, He broke it and said, “This is my body, which is given for you ..
~ I Corinthians 11:23,24