Gratitude in the Lean Times

There is a reason we say grace before the meal, not after.

Tell me this hasn't happened to you: family and friends gather around an enormous table decked out with the season's best fare. Somebody clears their throat and says, "I thought we should take some time to go around and say what we're thankful for." At that moment your mind goes blank while you scramble to think of something—anything—for which you are truly grateful without sounding like the greeting card you just picked up for Aunt Millie.

Moments like this challenge even the most cheerful.

Among the great ironies of life is that just when our gratitude is at its lowest, we are required to give thanks. And just when we feel the least charitable, we are required to wrap and distribute presents. Too often Thanksgiving feels less like we're "giving" thanks, and more like we're "paying" it when we didn't have it to begin with. And Christmas sometimes feels less like giving joyfully and more like culturally required debt enhancement.

All of us eventually go through seasons of unhappiness, sorrow, and even despair. It's impossible to be thankful, cheerful, and charitable all the time, and these times of emotional and spiritual emptiness come on us all. They can be as brief as a few moments or as enduring as decades—or even a lifetime—and each Thanksgiving or Christmas presents fresh challenges to personal joy during "the most wonderful time of the year."

The stresses certainly are enormous: the costs of travel, food preparation, and Christmas gift-giving can break a family's bank; few things can push one to the brink like dealing peaceably with difficult and irascible family members; and those with physical, spiritual, and emotional health problems can feel painfully alone, isolated, and misunderstood while all the celebrations are going on around them.

But that doesn't have to be the case.

In a New York Times Letter to the Editor, psychiatrist Sheldon Cholst, M.D., wrote that unhappiness is best described as those symptoms which occur "when expectations are not met." Indeed, most unhappiness seems to grow out of some essential form of unmet expectation. Dennis Prager, author of Happiness Is a Serious Problem, lists three: comparing ourselves to others, striving for images of perfection, and the "missing tile" syndrome.

Comparing Ourselves to Others
My family went through a recent year-and-a-half long bout with unemployment. During those long, long months, I frequently struggled with the temptation to become bitter and unthankful because my friends, and even strangers that I'd met, all had steady, reliable jobs, were able to make rent, and even had the luxury of buying nice things now and then. Meanwhile, we ate macaroni-and-cheese and scrambled to keep our heat going. The temptation to compare my situation to that of others was ever-present and alluring. But such comparisons (even when they seem most legitimate) make us even unhappier because this is the mother of jealousy. And jealousy never has its fill.

Once we begin comparing ourselves to others this way, no improvement in our circumstances will satisfy the green fire of jealousy. And if your circumstances don't change—or get worse—bitterness flares so much brighter it may never be extinguished. We begin to suffer from the myopia of the afflicted: everybody seems so much better off that our own circumstances seem perversely unfair. But even dramatic success and improvement doesn't guarantee the elimination of unhappiness.

Famed NBA athlete Scottie Pippen had a poor childhood, growing up in a small house without a lot of extras. But from 1999 through 2002, he was earning nearly $15 million a year, and owned a 74-foot yacht and a $100,000 Mercedes. But every time Pippen played a game in Portland's Rose Garden, he jealously contemplated billionaire Paul Allen sitting at courtside. Allen, cofounder of Microsoft and owner of both the Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks, was worth $40 billion. And Pippen longed to have even one of those billions. Just one!

"What does he have?" Pippen asked himself. "Forty billion? How can I make just one billion? I just want one of them! What do I need to do?" (PreachingToday.com, "When $15 million a year is not enough").

And maybe right now you're thinking you'd be happy with just one of Pippen's $14 million. Just one, right?

What's wrong here is that our expectations have been erroneously wired. We have come to expect that because we are all created equal, we should all get equal blessings, benefits, and rewards. The reality is that while we may all have equal spiritual and legal footing, none of us face identical, equal circumstances. As Jesus noted, God makes the sun shine on both the evil and the good, and he sends the rain to both the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). We should expect circumstances to dictate only one thing: that they happened. How we handle them and interpret them is entirely our own choice.

Images of Perfection
Our expectations are also set unrealistically high because we are too often romantics at heart. When we marry, we bring to the wedding so many idealistic, Hollywood-fueled expectations of the perfect marriage. And then we succumb to bitterness and ungratefulness when our spouse turns out to be nothing like the silver-screen sweetheart we hoped we'd married. We take new jobs, telling ourselves this job will be better than the last, and when it fails to meet our idealized expectations, we disengage. We start a new health program and at the first sign of failure, we toss the yogurt and tofu in the garbage bin.

We all have images in our hearts and minds of how life ought to be. Sometimes they're fueled by media imagery, but they also arise from the "halo effect" we ascribe to false memories of golden days gone by. Not only does modern life with its pressures not measure up to the golden ideal of life decades ago, even life back then didn't measure up to our reminiscences. We remember the "good parts," forget the bad, and elevate the false memories of the past to an impossible-to-attain ideal.

We need to recalibrate our expectations as we understand that the present will never live up to our memories of the past and the future will never measure up to the present. Instead, we ought to determine that we, ourselves, are equal to the demands of today. We need to till the soil of the present with the plow at hand right now, and not look back (Luke 9:61-62).

"Missing Tile" Syndrome
One sure way to sabotage gratitude and happiness is to fixate on one flaw to the exclusion of all that is good, like obsessing so heavily over a missing ceiling tile that we hate an entire house. It deserves to be said: this is childish thinking. I know, because I never encountered this kind of thought until I became a father. (Then I recognized it in myself.)

One day I took my children to a park. After several hours of playing and running around, they finally admitted to hunger. They'd been good kids, so I rewarded them with a trip to a burger joint with an indoor playground, followed by more hours of burger-fueled fun and frivolity.

After returning home, these sweaty little angels of light turned on me and suddenly became reluctant to obey. Perhaps they were overtired, perhaps I had spoiled them, but their disobedience resulted in immediate discipline which subsequently produced great, sorrowful tears.

Their repeated refrain: "This was a bad day!"

It's not like this should be a surprise. I, too, enjoy such childish thinking. When my feet hurt, the walk is ruined. When a button pops off, I'm unhappy with the shirt I've worn continuously for five years. When the Thanksgiving turkey is dry, it's hard to remember to give thanks.

This is, perhaps, the best reason to say grace before the meal, not after.

When Paul the apostle wrote to the church at Corinth, one of the issues he dealt with was overt, excessive bragging by false teachers. In a rare display of pedigree, Paul outlined some of the harsher experiences he'd endured for the sake of the gospel, and the range of hardship is memorable and eye-opening:

I've worked much harder, been jailed more often, beaten up more times than I can count, and at death's door time after time. I've been flogged five times with the Jews' thirty-nine lashes, beaten by Roman rods three times, pummeled with rocks once. I've been shipwrecked three times, and immersed in the open sea for a night and a day. In hard traveling year in and year out, I've had to ford rivers, fend off robbers, struggle with friends, struggle with foes. I've been at risk in the city, at risk in the country, endangered by desert sun and sea storm, and betrayed by those I thought were my brothers. I've known drudgery and hard labor, many a long and lonely night without sleep, many a missed meal, blasted by the cold, naked to the weather.
And that's not the half of it, when you throw in the daily pressures and anxieties of all the churches. When someone gets to the end of his rope, I feel the desperation in my bones. When someone is duped into sin, an angry fire burns in my gut.

And though he resorted to citing his pedigree of suffering for "bragging rights" to the gospel (and to make a point), Paul still wasn't merely comparing himself to others. Paul wasn't claiming his pain made him better or worse off than anybody else. Ultimately, what Paul was after was to be more like his Master, Jesus, who suffered everything for the sake of everyone:

If I have to "brag" about myself, I'll brag about the humiliations that make me like Jesus. (2 Cor. 11:23-33, The Message)

If there's anything to be thankful for, this is it: that Jesus is who he is. That he did what he did. And that we enjoy the privilege of sharing in a minuscule part of his suffering that we might be a little bit more like him. Our suffering in no way compares to the infinite agony Jesus suffered on the cross as God and man, but our temporary suffering does help produce within us a kind of godliness we can get no other way.

If we let it.

Rich Tatum is a freelance writer and Associate Publisher >for Digital Resources at Zondervan in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He blogs at TatumWeb.com/blog/.

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