Gratitude

by Mahlon Zehr

As I write, Thanksgiving Day remains more memory than anticipation. We haven’t started planning for this year’s Thanksgiving yet, but gratitude is on my mind, because I was reading to the children last night about the Israelites and their perpetual grumbling. People died because they grumbled, and more died because they wouldn’t stop. Prairie fires swept the through the tents, earthquakes ripped open the earth, poisonous snakes infested the camp, disease broke out. People choked on quail and died. Or perhaps the quail carried a zoonotic pathogen that infected them with disease. There seemed to be a culture of discontentment seeded in the children of Israel which bore a harvest of much grief, suffering, and unfulfilled hope.

Promise was suddenly, violently cut off. What kind of harvest propagates death instead of life?

Discontentment kills—indiscriminately, dispassionately, and messily. Like a newly mutated virus, it spreads, leaving brokenness and dying as its calling card. It kills hope. It kills possibility. It kills belief. Paradoxically, it even kills desire, if left unchecked. It will keep a whole generation out of the promised land.

Gratitude is hip. We are all too familiar with the fashionable pop culture exhortations to be thankful. New age gurus, behavioral therapists, and Hollywood celebrities all love to tout the self-help benefits of the gratitude attitude. The attitude of gratitude is the highest yoga, according to Yogi Bhajan. It can extend a person’s life span, raise endorphin levels, lower blood pressure, increase wellbeing, and lead to success in relationships. You can get all that for the bargain basement price of forwarding tasteful gratitude memes and quotes ad nauseum. We’ve heard the pop psychology of gratitude. But whether those celebrity exhortations or even our solid Anabaptist child training, backed up with terrifying Old Testament illustrations, has ever made the long, perilous journey from the head to the heart is a different question. Traversing that great gulf fixed between a man’s head and his heart is the quest of a man’s lifetime and one that is not often completed.

What is the difference between an easy embrace of self-help gratitude and a grateful heart? Socrates claimed that the difference between him and the Sophists was that they would say whatever they thought other people would believe, whether or not they believed it themselves, while he would say what he believed, whether anyone else believed it or not.

What if my thanksgiving is more a reflection of social expectation than of what is in my heart? While much of gratitude is undoubtedly rooted in right thinking, a heart of thanksgiving is as different from gratitude memes as grilled tri-tip is different from Grilling for Dummies.

I wonder if sometimes the reason we never get beyond the cookbook is because of a pious misunderstanding about what God said.

Paul said he learned contentment apart from circumstance. He wrote to the Thessalonians to give thanks in everything. He told the Ephesians to give thanks for everything, all the time.

Everything, all the time. It sounds so sold out, so radical. “Even so, Lord...” Forgive me for being the social klutz who ruins the mood here, but in what sense does God intend me to understand that? Literally, everything? Thankful for manna, thankful for quail, and thankful for the plague that came with it? I find myself unable to embrace the faux piety popular among Christians that affirms such theology. It is a Calvinist flavored determinism in vogue among us that says everything that happens, happens because God wanted it so, and so it is. To the contrary, I have learned that a great deal of what happens to me happens because Mahlon wanted it so, and, in spite of God, so it is. If our theology blurs the lines between the kinds of things God does, and the kinds of things Satan does, we have probably misunderstood God.

Of course, we should learn from our failures. Of course, we should be thankful that God can draw straight with crooked lines, but we blaspheme God when we frame those broken, crooked lines as God-ordained successes when they are, in fact, our own failures, or satanically driven carnage. A God who loves to create beauty out of ashes is not the same thing as a God who calls ashes good. We are not called to thank God for chaos and brokenness, as though it were somehow His idea; we are called to overcome it with good. It is that very possibility of overcoming real evil which provides solid grounding for Christian gratitude, beyond hip self-help offers of more endorphins and your best life now, and just as importantly, beyond the misguided, brute-force “faith” of Calvinist determinism.

The writer to the Hebrews says this, in the NASB; “Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe…”

I can give thanks because I am receiving and participating in a kingdom which cannot be shaken—a kingdom where all the things that have gone so terribly wrong since Eden can finally begin to be put right again. I am grateful for a God who stooped low enough to allow me to be part of His grand design of reconciliation, rebirth, and renewal.

As a Christian, my entire identity is rooted in the imitation of Christ, of bearing His image to the broken world around me for the express purpose of the restoration and renewal of it. I must recognize the reality of spiritual warfare around me. I must understand that not everything that happens is God’s perfect will, least of all the choices I sometimes make. The God of the universe cries tears of genuine sorrow for Mary and Martha and breaks the power of death. That is something to be grateful for. That is a foundation that can bear the weight of a thankfulness that has a real chance of making that long, long journey of a few inches from the head to the heart.

God, have mercy on me, a sinner. This old prayer, answered, is solid grounds for a heart of gratitude, and it is ground solid enough for anyone.