Gratitude

What I've seen in a year’s worth of Pleases and Thank Yous.

I have a document on my phone in which I note the appeals I am praying.

And at some point last year, I began adding something new to this document: notes of gratitude when the Lord gave an experience that felt unequivocally like a gift.

So. This document now captures the better part of a year’s worth of Pleases and Thank Yous.

A few observations from this:

1. Gifts are ample.

I have no rules for how often I must find or note a gift to appreciate—only when I feel moved to do so. Looking back, I discover I am moved in this way often.

For so long, I somewhat superstitiously resisted recording joys in my personal journals. My fear was that each pleasure would reveal a dark side I would rue—some cost or consequence yet to come I was too naïve to foresee—or that the recording of a joy would darken its memory in my mind.

I discovered something like the opposite. The past year or so has been rich, marked by large joyous experiences and seemingly small experiences that brought large joy regardless.

Was the year or so that came before that one, in which my joys went unrecorded, just as rich? I do not know. Will the year ahead be just as rich in its own way? Stay tuned.

2. My appeals in prayer range from too small to remember to too big to understand.

My prayers during past year have involved situations that must have seemed perilous or desperate at the time, though now that the time has passed, I struggle to remember what the concern was about.

My prayers during the past year have also involved situations so big, all I know is my feeling within them. My prayers turn vague because I do not fully understand the scope or nature of the problem, and therefore do not even know precisely what intervention I am praying for. (The consolation: Romans 8:26-27. Hear the prayer I do not know to pray.)

3. God is not exasperated by my need.

So many of my Pleases in the past year have come to Thank Yous. The Lord has given what I prayed for. Fears, in various cases, have been answered or put to rest. My temptation in this is to stop, as though I have credits with God, as though I know what my credit limit is, as though I know the threshold of presumptuousness past which it is impolite to ask the Creator for more.

How curious this is. The experience of a hoped-for joy brings with it the temptation—even the inward argument—to retreat from the very source of joy.

I can fairly readily develop a conclusive argument that God is not exasperated by my asking. An infinite God would not reach a limit to his patience. The miracles he let us see during the time of the gospel accounts (such as water into wine, and feeding the thousands) portray abundance. He asks us to ask (Matthew 7:7). He asks us to come to him like children (Matthew 18:3). Scarcity, or the expectation of scarcity, is the hang-up of grownups.

Indeed, the unasked-for gifts I recorded are far more numerous in my document than the Thank Yous for gifts sought. The Lord has more to give than I am asking.

It is difficult to see the right conclusion in this. I have loss ahead of me in some fashion; we all do. Trouble will come. That God litters the path with gifts is not the principle to see or the expectation to draw.

But there is something more good in the life he makes than what I am apt to see or find in the life I make myself. I darken the way with my austere and throttled hope, shaded by fear. When I simply try to look at what comes, honestly, and take note of it, I am heartened to observe how often I find some surprising reason to give thanks.

Photo: “Thank you card” by -l.i.l.l.i.a.n-

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