A Perspective for When Thankfulness is Hard

Thankfulness has gotten hard lately.  This shocked me to discover, because I thought silver-lining-finder me was good at it, and now I’m discovering that maybe, I’m not.

Our church is practicing 28 days of gratitude between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’re participating as a family, and so far, I hate it, to be quite honest.

A few weeks ago, our pastor shared this quote from Jim Wilder: “Practicing sustained appreciation for five minutes, three times daily, over 30 days can reset the brain's nervous system to operate on joy rather than stress or fear, fundamentally altering emotional and mental well-being.”

I got annoyed. Neuroscience falls flat when reality speaks differently.

Because we’ve already been doing this for years, yet our stress has grown. Every day on the way to school, my daughter and I pray together, thanking God for the day before us. Every night, we gather as family, each of us thanking God for our day, very specifically.

Yet both my husband and I are full of stress. Our earnest prayers of the last few years have not only gone unanswered, but more and more things seem to come against us. Even still, we’ve continued to thank God and seek Him together.

What’s wrong? I’m having to get humble and admit the problem must be us.

I’m realizing, as we struggle through these 28 days of gratitude, that my prayers of thankfulness had become repetitively mechanical. “Thank you, God, for the glorious sun this morning… that school went more smoothly today…that we’re finally together as a family for dinner tonight…that You faithfully continue to protect my daughter.” I probably say those exact things multiple times of a week, until they’ve become easy fall-backs when I don’t know what else to say.

But now, I have a guideline on my refrigerator to shake me out of my box. So when it asks me to thank Jesus for His wisdom and guidance in my life, I realize I’ve been harboring feelings of abandonment, because I don’t feel like we’ve been receiving the wisdom and guidance we’ve sought.

I’ve had to dig deep, and recognize the ways He HAS imparted His wisdom and guidance, regardless of whether that’s lead to the outcomes we’ve wanted. It’s making me pause long enough to hear Jesus whisper, “I’m not done yet! Trust me in the middle!”
Sometimes the messy middle lasts a lot longer than we think it should. And sometimes an answer to one situation comes but we miss it because of the chaos of three other situations swirling at the same time.

The key, I think, is that maybe gratitude isn’t about thanking God because He gave us what we thought we needed, or even that we notice the unexpected ways He blesses us throughout our day. It’s recognizing who He IS and trusting in His character and goodness even when we’re in a very long middle and can’t see the end the way that He can.

Thankfulness is still hard right now.

But right now, I’m genuinely thankful for this gratitude journey to challenge our hearts, reveal bitterness we didn’t realize had been growing, draw us closer to God’s heart, and provide the opportunity for us to practice what it might mean to be thankful in the midst of all situations.

I think it’s ok to admit that thankfulness is hard right now, and good to press in and practice gratitude in a deeper, more raw way.

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