My Second Annual Thankfulness Post

It's Thanksgiving week, which makes it a great time to write a post about thankfulness.  Most of the ideas in this post are suggested by a very interesting Ann Voskamp book that I just read, thanks (pun intended) to the long-distance book club I'm in with my mom and my sister.  (I would recommend this book, as Voskamp is intelligent and spiritually insightful, but with the warning that you will have to get past her HUGELY DISTRACTING writing style.)  Voskamp's thesis is that thankfulness is the key ingredient when it comes to experiencing joy and knowing intimacy with God.  Here are some things her book made me think about:

• Be thankful for the specific, sensory gifts all around you: So often when we think of the things we are thankful for, we only think of things that are big (like our house), or very general (like good health), or most meaningful (like our family).  These are all great things to be thankful for, but they leave out lots of what moment-to-moment life consists of and they don't re-orient us towards an ongoing attitude of thankfulness.  Voskamp encourages us to be really specific in our thankfulness and to notice the small gifts that are around us all the time, and one good way to do this is to notice all the beautiful things that we perceive through our five senses.  So in the morning, I might be thankful for the smell of fresh coffee brewing, the feel of warm socks on my feet, the sound of a bird chirping out the window, the sight of the sun rising, and the taste of sweet syrup on a pumpkin pancake.  This all sounds a little cheesy, but if you make an ongoing effort to really pay attention to these things and to understand them as gifts from God that make your life more beautiful and enjoyable, it really does make a difference.  
• Thankfulness in ordinary tasks.  Voskamp encourages us to connect the mundane tasks of our life to an attitude of thankfulness, and again to be really specific about it.   Examples would look like this:  I'm grateful to be scrubbing out this frying pan because it means i have food to eat; I'm grateful to be out grocery shopping, buying these overpriced applesauce squeezes because it reminds me that Joshua is eating by mouth; I'm grateful to be responding to cries in the middle of the night because it means I have these sweet children and I was given the job to comfort them when they are hurting.  Again, it sounds a little hokey when you read about it, but life is so much about perspective, and this is a helpful way to reorient towards a perspective of thankfulness.
• Be thankful in the midst of trials and suffering.  This is the most difficult one to describe, but it is undoubtedly one of the marks of a mature Christian and a truly grateful person.  Here are two things it does not look like:  1)  "It could be so much worse" (feeling grateful that your life is not as bad as the worst possible scenario), and 2) the gratitude is focused on the good things that you can see coming out of your suffering.  I'm not saying either of these things, particularly the second one, is a wrong way to think...but the end goal is to learn how to be grateful in the midst of suffering, without comparing your situation to others and without needing to see obvious good things coming from the suffering.  I think this article gets at it a little bit.  Another part of it is that trials and suffering help us remember that our hope is not in this world...as a popular K-Love song puts it, "What if my greatest disappointments or the aching of this life is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can't satisfy?"  There is certainly some mystery in this type of thankfulness (how to get there, what it looks like), and I would welcome any commenters who can elaborate on this point.  

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This last thing is not from the Voskamp book, but it's about thankfulness, so I'm tacking it on:

I read Ecclesiastes recently, at the same time as reading the Voskamp book, and for the first time noticed how much Ecclesiastes emphasizes thankfulness.  At different times when I've read Ecclesiastes, I've thought it was confusing, depressing, social-justicey, and keeping it real, but this time the verses on thankfulness really stuck out.  Here's just one example (emphasis added):

"I have seen another evil under the sun, and it weighs heavily on mankind: 2 God gives some people wealth, possessions and honor, so that they lack nothing their hearts desire, but God does not grant them the ability to enjoy them, and strangers enjoy them instead. This is meaningless, a grievous evil.  3 A man may have a hundred children and live many years; yet no matter how long he lives, if he cannot enjoy his prosperity and does not receive proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he."  Eccl. 6:1-3

So the two things I take away from these verses (and the others in Ecclesiastes like them) are: 

1.  Thankfulness / contentment is a gift from God.
2.  The ability to be thankful (for wealth, success, relationships, etc.) is the really important thing, not how much of the thing you have.

And with that, I am off to do some household chores, which I will attempt to complete gratefully :).  Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!  I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend!