Practicing Faith: Gratitude

Hello,
welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are glad to have you joining us in another conversation as we discuss what it means to
practice the faith in real and concrete ways.
And you know, I think today’s conversation is one that is easy to talk about.
I’m not sure that it is so easy to live out,
especially in the day by day kind of process.
We’re going to be talking about gratitude.
We’re going to let that lead us into the conversation about joy and generosity.
And, you know, in one sense, Clint, I think this is timely.
Thanksgiving’s coming around the corner.
We think about what we’re grateful for.
But as you do every time that you talk about gratitude,
we have to start with a
recognition that this can’t be a topic confined to the month of November.
It’s got to be something that as Christians we recognize goes to the very core of who we are.
And that is a very theological reality.
And it is therefore,
I think, well included in a topic where we’re trying to think about practicing the faith.
Yeah. And I think, Michael, the good news this week is that gratitude is one of the
easiest practices or disciplines to do.
It is not complicated.
It doesn’t take a lot of preparation or study.
It really just takes a moment or two of being mindful and nearly everyone can do it.
The wonderful thing about attempting to embody more gratitude in our life.
This is something we can do with children on up until the very late moments of our life.
We have these opportunities that are always before us.
And the other good news about gratitude in my experience is that gratitude, when practiced well,
can very quickly move the needle on some other traits in our life.
Things that we’re going to discuss like joy and generosity.
Things that are deeply connected to this foundation of being grateful,
of taking
count of the blessings of our life and giving thanks for them.
It’s not that that’s always easy to do.
I think it’s that when we do it,
it is not difficult.
And the more that we do it,
I think the more we will see it bear fruit
in not only gratitude,
but some other areas of our life as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And let me be a little elementary here, Clint.
But I do think it needs said,
we all need reminded of it.
When we say grateful,
we don’t mean happy.
And that’s a mistake I think a lot of us make.
It’s an easy thing to slip into that we think,
well, I need to be happy in my circumstance.
And that’s not at all what we have in mind.
Sometimes gratitude does come with it,
the emotion of happiness.
But gratitude is actually something far deeper than that.
It is something that is affected in us because of something that has been done
for us, at least from the Christian perspective.
Now, you can talk about gratitude from a more secular sort of advantage.
We could talk about,
you know, survey your life for the good things.
You could talk about how gratefulness is us recognizing what’s good because that’s
biologically good for us as humans.
And there’s plenty of books and podcasts where that kind of thing is going to get talked about.
But gratitude from a Christian faith perspective is something that is naturally given to us
because of something that Christ has done for us.
Everything that Christ did is always ahead of the life that we live.
His choice to live,
his choice to die and then rise again,
send to heaven is this whole story
that transforms our story so that what was true for him can also be true for us.
So therefore,
if today’s a good day and you’re naturally happy in it,
or today’s a bad day and it’s hard to be happy in the midst of it,
that cannot substantially change who God is and who God has decided to be for you,
for us.
And because of that,
we have to begin to reframe the idea of gratefulness away from
temporary emotion, depending upon our circumstances,
to a constant and persistent reality
that we must be reminded of.
I think in that sense, Michael,
gratitude is in some ways an expression of trust.
Maybe not in the moments where we are grateful for things that make us happy.
When we take stock of our day or our life and we see many things in it that we’re genuinely
thankful for.
Those moments are pretty easy.
It is easy to make a list of things we’re grateful for.
And those first dozen or so things are going to be very simple.
They’ll bring us joy.
They’ll be obvious.
But as you move your way to give gratitude for
a broader spectrum of things in your life,
including some things that at least initially
are hard to call gifts,
there is a sense in which to be grateful for moments of struggle and difficulty,
or to be grateful for things that are not apparently blessings,
demand a certain trust that we put our faith in the idea that God is ultimately working with us and for us.
And therefore, some of the challenges in our life are in fact opportunities for growth.
And while we may not be thankful for the challenge itself,
if we trust that God is in the process,
we can give thanks for what the challenge may produce in us and in our life.
And I think those
who have surfed difficult waters and navigated hard moments have that sense of looking back that
they can now say,
“I find myself grateful for things I could have never imagined in the moment
I would ever give thanks for.
I could never have expected that in the midst of the pain and
struggle of that event or that challenge,
that I would one day look back and say,
“I see God was at work in some ways that I missed at the time,
and for that I give thanks.” And so,
yes,
gratitude should certainly apply to those things that are positive.
But correctly understood,
gratitude is much bigger than that.
And I think that helps us understand why that some of being
grateful is a struggle.
To be grateful for good things means only to recognize them.
To be grateful for hard things means to trust that God is at work in them as well.
Yeah, I think that’s so well said,
Clint.
And I want to even sort of linger there a little bit and
tease out a connection that you just made.
I think there is a direct connection between
trusting God and then that moving us forward as we seek to be people who are able to be fully
integrated as God’s children.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
In the midst of difficult
circumstances, we all become wounded.
That’s a reality of life.
We will become broken.
And that’s what it is to be human.
And in the midst of those moments,
trusting God is the only road towards those wounds healing well.
And the wounds that heal well
ultimately become places of great strength and beauty.
And I think that gratitude is this
essential sort of muscle that is required for us to recover as life becomes difficult.
It is this essential kind of glue that holds together these disparate tensions of our lives,
whether that’s relational or physical or whatever it might be.
Clint, I think gratitude is this
unique gift that God has given us to see that the world isn’t all about us.
And that even in our
struggle, that struggle isn’t all of the world’s struggle,
that God is still present and that
there are things to be grateful for because struggle isn’t the only thing.
And I think it
goes the other way,
too.
That’s the temptation of gratitude.
When we think of gratitude as happy,
it’s easy to accept a counterfeit of gratitude,
which is the happiness of my life is going well,
and I don’t really need God right now.
And so gratitude is just abiding kind of,
well, I’m happy that things are good for me.
And that’s not it either.
The truth is far deeper than that,
that gratitude is this kind of spiritual muscle that holds together really our souls in the
midst of whatever life might bring.
And I think we would all be helped by becoming more aware of
and attuned to how well we’re doing practicing that gratitude muscle.
I think one way maybe to say that,
Michael, is that for the Christian,
the core of our gratitude
is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
And therefore,
we always have access to being grateful.
In the midst of even challenging circumstances,
there is underneath of the
struggle that core sense of knowing that we are loved in Christ,
and that’s the well from which we draw gratitude.
So gratitude is more than just taking stock of the good things in life and
thinking, “Well, I guess there’s enough good that I should be thankful.” Yes, that’s true.
But whether or not that’s true,
there is gratitude in simply knowing the good news of the gospel as it pertains
to each of us.
And that’s where gratitude starts.
It doesn’t necessarily end there,
but it always begins there.
It doesn’t work backwards.
We don’t start from the good things in our life
and work to gratitude.
We start from Jesus,
and that allows us to be grateful
for the things in our life.
And last week, Michael, we talked about some of the ways that
we could practice gratitude.
We talked about journaling.
Gratitude is one of those things
that in terms of the actual doing of it is fairly simple.
You can write it down,
you can say it out loud,
you can include it in prayer,
you can take pictures of it.
I mean,
the actual working
out of gratitude is fairly simple.
What’s harder, I think, is the mechanism of doing it, the practice
of doing it.
There are lots of ways to express gratitude.
You can do that every time you sit down to eat.
You can do that every day with your phone recording a message or a list.
But to remember to do it,
to live into that sort of state of being grateful all the time,
is, I think, by far the more difficult challenge.
Agree completely.
And I also don’t want to reach
back into last week,
certainly jump into that conversation.
But I think you’re going to find,
as you practice gratitude,
you’re going to become more and more specific as you go.
I would really caution you, don’t get caught in a trap of saying,
“Well, I’m grateful for my health.
I’m grateful for my family.” That may be very true,
and that’s a good thing to be grateful for.
But I would encourage you to dig below the surface of that.
Well, what are you grateful about in your relationship?
What are you grateful for about your health?
I’ve had conversations with people,
Clint, who say, “I’m grateful for my health.” And what they mean by that,
after a season of cancer
treatment, after seasons of difficulty,
is they mean the depth of my health.
They’re aware of a body that can be broken and the wonderful providence of a God who can heal.
But most of us, when we say that,
it’s sort of a platitude that,
“I’m grateful I didn’t have to think about
my body today.” Whatever that is,
I would encourage you to allow your imagination to run deeper
than that.
Because what you’re going to discover is that gratitude is,
I think, a fundamental building block of our existence in the world,
that you can go to the very bottom of everything.
You can be grateful that gravity keeps us in connection to the sun and that we continue spinning.
We can be grateful that as creation happens,
we get all of the creatures that surround us and the beauty
of a sunset and that the fact that the sky is blue.
The things that we just live our lives in
sort of a habit of placidity can become for us a moment of color and beauty and meaning when we’re
only willing to sort of start looking at them through new eyes.
And that’s why it has to be
a practice.
It has to be something that we intentionally set ourselves to.
Whether you
write it or how you do it,
I think you’re exactly right, Clint.
That’s really immaterial.
What is material is,
does it force you over time to begin to see deeper than just the surface things of our
lives?
Because if you do,
you will be shocked to discover how much there is to be grateful for.
I think once we train ourselves to look through the lens of gratitude,
we will find that there is
always something that we see.
That there is always something for which we can be thankful,
for which we can be grateful.
There will always be,
when we look through the practice of gratitude,
be a blessing that is apparent to us.
I had a friend who has since died of pancreatic illness
and in a season that he wasn’t doing well,
in fact not too long before his death,
I went to visit him
and I hope I never forget this, Michael.
He said,
“Clint, do you know what cancer taught me?”
And I said,
“No, no.” And he said,
“It taught me that I don’t have any problems.”
And I remember kind of looking at him going,
“You have terminal cancer.
You have the biggest
problem I can think of.” And he said,
“I used to,
I’d look out at the yard and I’d think,
‘Oh, I have to get the yard mode.’ I don’t worry about the yard now.
I don’t worry
about the bills.
I’ll pay the bills,
but I don’t spend any time worrying.” He said,
“If I get up and I can keep some breakfast down,
that’s a great day and I’m thankful for that.”
And he said, “Some of those things I took for granted and I didn’t know about until cancer
showed them to me.” And not to make a dark point,
but I think that’s what I mean.
When we look at
life through the lens of gratitude,
we will, even in very difficult moments,
see something that we
can be thankful for.
And I hope to embody that in my own life.
I certainly saw it in my friend and
it’s sometimes a hard lesson,
but a wonderful gift to have a perspective that is always open
to what I’m grateful for, to finding,
not even what I’m grateful for, to finding something
to be grateful for.
And Michael,
we’ve talked about how we would practice gratitude.
I want to back up for a minute and talk about one of the barriers of gratitude.
And there are so many
things in our society for which we can be grateful.
We live in a society that affords us
a tremendous number of blessings,
but our society, it seems to me,
doesn’t always know what to do
with gratitude.
And you don’t have to look very far.
I mean, what’s Thanksgiving?
You’ve got,
right before it, we give everybody candy.
Right afterwards, we go shopping for new stuff.
We have this moment where we kind of pause and everybody gives thanks.
But from the time that we’re born,
in the modern age at least,
we have seen thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands of commercials,
advertisements,
videos on our phone, our computer,
all trying to teach us that we don’t
have enough, that we need something else,
that if we could get the right car,
if we could get the
right job, if we get the promotion,
if we get enough money,
we will be fulfilled.
We’ll be happy.
And then we can be grateful.
Well, it doesn’t work because when you get to that step,
then you see the next step.
And you think, well, that’s when I’ll be happy.
That’s when I’ll be satisfied.
And
I think one of the downsides of American culture being capitalist and arguably materialistic,
is that it doesn’t provide a very good foundation for us to learn gratitude.
Watch your kids at their birthday or Christmas and they open something and they’re excited with
it for five minutes and then it’s what’s next.
And take your kids to the amusement park and
on the way home,
they’re unhappy because they didn’t get their way about something on the bus.
I mean, it’s just,
we don’t do gratitude as a people very well in my opinion.
And I think
one of the opportunities that gives is that for Christians,
we really have to kind of cut against
the grain to learn it.
Agreed completely.
In fact,
you know, shorthand for that,
I think we try to
commodify gratitude and we miss the opportunity for gratitude to be made personal.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
I think anything is commodified when we believe that if we could get that thing
into our life, that it would make a substantial change in our life.
That can be stuff,
but that can be work.
That can be relationships that we can in so many ways become convinced that if I can get
that thing into my heart,
then I’m going to be complete.
I’m going to be happy.
I’m going to be
grateful.
And that is the ultimate illusion.
It’s the ultimate thing that holds out in front of you,
the temptation to live an entire life, reaching,
striving,
straining.
And then you reach the end
and you realize there was no prize there because the human temptation to take a thing and to fill
it into our hearts is not the solution to the ache that we feel as humans.
The solution is rather to
give our hearts to a God who wants us to be known and loved and included in a relationship
more perfect than we can imagine.
That’s the hope of the gospel.
Gratitude cannot be found by pulling
things into our life.
It can only be found by letting go of the things that we tend to make
more important than they should be for the relationship with a God who has already loved
us, called us as his own,
merely desiring for us to give up those things so that we might have
that kind of relationship.
And if we’re willing to do that,
I don’t want to oversimplify.
If we’re willing to get out of our own way,
if we’re willing to make our lives about more than just the things
that we believe promise us the happiness and ultimately the joy that we would like to have,
we’re going to discover that the way of losing oneself,
as Jesus says, is ultimately the way of
finding oneself.
When we give up the things that we become obsessed with and preoccupied with,
we’re going to find a God who’s waiting for us,
that that father who Jesus described,
waiting for the wayward son to return home.
That’s what we’re going to discover.
And I don’t know how
when we discover that God,
we could not live lives filled with gratitude.
How you could be
the son who goes and wastes an inheritance and then sees the father waiting.
I don’t know how
you could not possibly be moved by a life of eternal gratitude.
One way to frame that maybe,
Michael, that when we live our life in pursuit of the future,
we miss the present.
And gratitude
is always about the now.
Gratitude is what I’m thankful for,
the experience I have,
the blessings I have in this moment,
trusting that God will continue to be with me in the future
and that God will walk with me into the future.
And when we get on this treadmill of the next thing,
the retirement,
the next house, the next step, the next whatever it is,
when we constantly are thinking that meaning is out in front of us somewhere,
it really does hinder our ability to
be grateful because gratitude is always that opportunity to pause where we are,
when we are, as we are,
and to recognize that God has already blessed us.
The blessing is not the thing out in
front of us like a dangling carrot leading us onward.
The blessing is where we already stand.
It’s where we start as a matter of fact.
It’s the beginning.
And again, not to beat up on USA,
but of all the things our culture does well,
it has been my experience that gratitude,
gratitude is a struggle for many Americans.
And you and I have both seen funerals,
been to funerals and done funerals,
Michael, where the sad truth is someone lived their life
expecting that at one point in the future,
it would all work out,
it would all come together.
And in doing that,
they missed the present,
they missed the opportunities they had along the way.
And I think gratitude is the safety net that keeps us from falling into that trap. Yeah, and Clint,
one of the markers of that when you’re thinking of an end of life and family
and friends coming to celebrate it,
one knows when someone has lived a life that’s had some
gratitude if there’s some joy at the funeral.
And I’m not saying happiness,
there’s significant grief and loss at the funeral,
but there’s a marked difference in the atmosphere in place
of the person who’s lived their life not chasing counterfeit things.
A person who has found the
substantial rock of God’s love,
and that has become a defining aspect of their life.
A person who’s lived in gratitude,
to say that more simply,
that person leaves behind them a kind of wake of
joy that is powerful.
We’ve used these words already,
we’ve talked about happiness,
we’ve talked about joy.
Clint, I think it’s important that we tease out how is this connected to gratitude So imagine that you lived your life believing that the treasure was somewhere up the road,
and you had to scrape and scrap and dig and work,
and you had to go find it.
But it was out there somewhere.
And then imagine the difference of saying,
“No, I start with the treasure,
and it goes with me.
I already have the treasure,
and now I get to live my life knowing
that I’ve already found it.” And I think what happens,
Michael, is instead of that sense of
fear, instead of that idea that I may miss out,
instead of that unhappiness about what I don’t
have or didn’t achieve or accomplish or receive,
I’m free to find,
again, just as gratitude,
to find joy,
to look in my life and say,
“This blessing isn’t something I compare to some
greater blessing that I hope to have down the road.
This blessing is enough for today.
This is my daily bread.
This is the thing that gives me joy today.” And if you’ve ever had the
opportunity to be around people that embodied that,
they are astounding people,
joyful people.
There is a depth there and a richness there,
and almost all of the joyful people I’ve ever known
in my life have been through hard times.
This is not the case that you just live an easy life,
and that makes it easy to be joyful.
That has not been my experience at all.
In fact,
the most joyful people I know have walked hard ground and come through it with an ability to say,
“I’m not going to spend my time and put my mind in places that I’m going to have joy.
I’m going to find…” And it’s very difficult.
How does one practice joy?
If I told you,
“You need to be
more joyful,” well, how do you do that?
And that, again, that’s the invitation.
The connection between gratitude and joy is a natural one.
And as we practice gratitude,
almost inevitably, we will find…
In fact, I would say we will always find that joy comes along as sort of a two-for-one.
Yeah.
How much do we talk about testing right now in our culture with COVID,
that test, find the virus, test, test, test?
What would it look like to test for joy?
And I think you’re going to find
that joy hangs out in very difficult,
dark,
broken places, and that’s not intuitive.
I don’t think that even as I say it,
those words sound simple.
We might even think,
“Well, yeah, okay, that seems
reasonable.” It is a deep truth,
and I think a challenging truth.
Take, for instance, the Christmas story.
It’s the thing we read every year.
Joy to the world, right?
We might think that gets
proclaimed in this sort of angelic, heavenly,
amazing scene.
In our minds, we’re thinking beautiful porcelain and wonderful decorations.
We’re thinking all of the best of the Christmas season.
No, this gets proclaimed to people working the night shift in a job that nobody really wants, right?
What’s a modern equivalent?
The joy to the world,
angelic hosts proclaimed to the person
working the night shift at the convenience store in the middle of nowhere.
You know,
whatever that is,
there is no sense in which joy makes sense,
if you let me say it that way.
That joy could exist
in a place where there aren’t important people and where things aren’t always going well,
and where you’re doing the thing that you might not even want to do doesn’t make sense to us humanly.
But that’s the invitation to practicing faith.
I think it goes back to once again,
the trust that lives at the very foundation of gratitude.
That if we’re willing to look
intently at the life that we have been given to the God who knows us by name and holds us in our
own place and time,
then there is really no other outcome of that Clint than an abiding joy.
Because we recognize, as you’ve already said so well,
that it’s not the thing that we’re reaching for,
but it’s the thing that we already have.
It already lives within us.
The thing that we seek outside
us is available if we’re but willing to humble ourselves and to be grateful for the gift that
has come.
And if that happens,
we’ll know something of what it means to be joyful,
and we will have
less and less temptation to identify joy as an emotional high that we call happiness.
That, “Oh, I’m happy today because when I got my coffee,
they gave me a free donut.” Well,
that’s nice, but that’s not an abiding reality like joy is.
It’s a great point,
Michael, that both gratitude and joy are the natural outflow
of knowing the truth of the gospel.
That when I understand myself as a beloved child of God,
when I come to the moment of believing that,
of receiving that truth,
that I am not the
culmination of my mistakes,
my doubts, my failures, that I am a beloved child of God through Jesus Christ,
the natural response of that is both gratitude and joy.
And when those aren’t present
in our life, it’s because we’ve covered them.
They belong to the faith.
And when we fail
to practice them, when they fail to manifest themselves in my life,
it’s because I have
followed some other path.
I have looked to some other thing for meaning.
I have looked to some
other thing for joy.
I have trusted some other message or listened to some other message.
And so
part of what it means,
I think, to be grateful and joyful is simply to return to the simplistic
message that brings both of them to our hearts.
You are loved.
You are a beloved child of God,
and that sets us free to be both grateful and joyful.
And, Michael, the most powerful manifestations of that that I’ve seen in people have been in places like hospice rooms,
where people even facing the reality of their own death,
gathering with loved ones, have exhibited
a kind of joyfulness,
not happy about the circumstances,
but the kind of joy that
resonates knowing that they have been loved,
that they have loved others,
a kind of gratitude of
looking over their life and finding those things in it that have been connected to that joy and those relationships.
And, again,
when a person is able to do that,
when a person is able to face
even the end of their life with a sense of gratefulness,
with a sense of serenity or joyfulness,
it is remarkable.
I mean, I can only hope when my turn comes to be in that situation
that those who gather with me will be able to see something like that.
It is truly remarkable, and
I admire grateful, joyful people tremendously,
and I continue to aspire to be one of them at some point.
Yeah, let’s not make the mistake of thinking here,
Clint, that if you go out
and buy a gratitude journal,
that tomorrow you’ve made it.
That’s not how this works.
The Grand Canyon gets cut over a long period of time as that water runs through it,
and the reality is that gratitude is a practice that can ultimately transform us into joyful people
so that we can be generous with those around us.
And I think that’s the sort of practical thrust
that moves out of us as we experience this reality in a life lived where this is practiced regularly.
This is maybe another reason not to,
once again, throw sort of a wet fish at America,
but we’re not the greatest people at running the marathon.
We tend to sprint to the end,
and we sort of set our side on the goal and we go.
But the reality is,
gratitude requires a lifelong habit.
When we say practicing faith in this instance,
we don’t just mean like in little spurts.
We mean over the long arc of our life,
as we practice gratitude,
it will make us joyful people.
But that joy will become the springboard
so that we can be generous with other people.
And that’s a connection I think we would be remiss
to not make in this conversation,
is that another marker of how we are doing in this practice of
gratitude is how able we are to open our hands in generosity to others.
I think this is true, Michael.
I cannot think of an instance where I have known
a generous person who was not a grateful person.
I don’t think I have known a bitter person who
was also generous.
I don’t think I have known an unhappy,
complaining,
skeptical person who also practiced generosity and was a gracious giver.
I think that those three things that
streams always find a way at some point down the road to meet up into one current
joy, generosity,
and gratitude.
They really are connected in ways in which
any single one of them will inevitably bring you into conversation and into
connection with the other two.
I think there’s no way around that.
I think if you practice
generosity, if you commit yourself to be giving a person who gives praise,
a person who gives
encouragement, I’m not just talking money,
but if you give graciously,
if you make it a point to do
that in your life,
you’re going to find yourself more grateful.
You’re going to find yourself more aware.
I think you’re going to find yourself more joyful.
I think the beautiful invitation
of all of these is that they lead to one another.
I think you’re right,
Clint, though I wonder,
it’d be interesting if we could have you with us in this conversation.
I wonder how many of us, Clint,
would initially think that these are three chords in the same strand because I think a lot
of times when we come to the idea of generosity,
we think of it as being opposed by hard work.
We think that, you know, well, I’ve earned this, so I want to be careful that I give to others
because I think that they should earn it.
And we have this idea of what we’ve done versus what we do for others.
The temptation in viewing generosity that way is that we miss the reality that
Christian generosity is always built upon the foundation of Christ’s gift for us.
In other words,
there is no Christian generosity.
None.
There is no generosity from a Christian heart that does not
flow on some level from gratitude for what Christ has done for us.
And that takes out this whole
other side of the equation,
Clint. It’s no longer about what have I earned versus what you’ve earned
versus what I deserve versus what you deserve.
This is how we tend to break that down as we’re
struggling to be generous people.
But in reality,
if we are to be generous,
we must start from the
fountainhead of the generosity given to us.
And this is so important that we have a time in
Christian worship every week to remind ourselves of it.
And I do not at all mean for this to be
preachy, because the truth is,
as a guy who often ends up being the one to offer that reminder that
we should be people who are giving and generous,
I’m probably the one in the room who needs it most.
It’s just every week to be reminded,
it’s not about you.
It’s not about what you want.
It’s not about what you think is important.
It’s about responding to the very gift that Christ has given to find
our root in the generous gift of Christ that allows us to become the kind of people who can
be joyful and who can be immersed in gratitude.
And they do all I think converge in this sort of beautiful way.
Two things, Michael, and that’s well said.
And I think it certainly bears repeating
and remembering that for the Christian,
giving is always the extension of receiving.
Receiving what we do.
And perhaps that’s why the bridge between them is gratitude.
To be able to start
with what we have received and then be moved to be grateful and therefore inevitably to be generous.
I think that that’s good theology.
That’s a good understanding of how following Christ works itself
out in one’s life.
The other thing I would say is we do want to be a little careful that we make
sure we’re clear that generosity is not the same as giving.
Giving is a part of generosity to make
donations, to leave nice tips for servers.
Those things are all important aspects and important practices of generosity,
but it’s not the full experience.
Generosity also means not assuming
the worst of people.
It means being generous with our thoughts.
It means being generous with our
time.
It means to not look for the problem when there may not be one or not be suspicious of
people’s motives until there’s some reason to be.
And I don’t mean that we can be naive,
but I mean there is a certain amount of generosity that happens internally.
We think of generosity
of giving as an external act,
but as one who struggles with it,
a lot of our challenges
in regards to being generous I think have to do with our thoughts,
our attitudes, and the way that
we may encounter other people.
It is a very difficult thing to quantify,
and I think that
maybe we could look through literature to find some characters that would help us sort of catch
the vision of it.
But I would put to you, Clint,
that if we went through our rolodexes,
through our contact lists,
there would be people who,
as you come across their name,
would inspire within you a kind of warmth and appreciation,
maybe even we would say admiration,
because when you’re with them,
it feels like the time that you spend with them is just a complete gift given to you.
The generosity that they share is something that just effortlessly flows out of their relationships with
others, and so that when you’re with them,
it feels like they have more than enough time for you,
that they’re there with this expressed desire to connect with you in a meaningful way.
There’s more than enough within them that they don’t need to hold back and they don’t need to be closed off,
that they’re there to be present and open,
and I think it’s meaningful that our idea of generosity
is often hands held up.
There’s this reality that I’m not holding anything back.
I have nothing to
hold back.
I have all that I need,
and I do think generosity,
joy,
gratitude,
these are things that
look great on motivational posters.
They’re easy to talk about once we get into the Advent season,
and we have beautiful decorations and wreaths,
and we want to talk about joy,
right?
These are things that I think nobody comes to the conversation upset about,
but when you start really thinking
that this is a call to be Christian,
it’s a mark of discipleship,
that we practice gratitude,
that we become joyful people,
that we practice generosity in our life,
if this is true,
then I think most of us upon honest assessment would confess there’s some work to do.
Absolutely,
and to that end,
and as we move toward closure here, Michael,
let’s think about that for a moment.
So the person listening who says,
“You know,
I want to be more grateful.
I want to be more attuned to gratitude.
I want to have more joy.
I want to experience joy more often and more regularly,
and I want to be generous.
What are the steps
that we can take?” You know,
we’ve mentioned journaling, which is, I think,
a great opportunity
to kind of take account of the blessings in our life.
I think if you’ve not already done that,
you could go and listen to last week’s podcast,
or you could simply start today and make a short
list for the next several days,
at least two weeks,
and probably more like a month,
of five things a day for which you’re grateful.
And you will find initially that’s easy,
and it gets more difficult,
which is also when I think it gets deeper,
and you could do something like that.
Obviously, donations,
you know, phone calls, writing letters.
But Michael, for the person that’s thinking something practical,
what are some of the practical ways that we can
incorporate these themes into our life?
What do we tell them?
Yeah, I would look for a sign of some kind.
It could be anything to you.
I think it could be a
rubber band.
I think it could be a sticky note that you put on your monitor at work.
It could really honestly be anything.
But Clint, I think it would be good for us to have visible reminders
in our life to check ourselves as we speak and act towards others.
Are we being critical?
Do we rely heavily on sarcasm in our language with others?
Are we undercutting everything that
someone says to us?
These are not marks of people of gratitude.
These are marks of broken
souls and hurt bodies and minds.
I think what we need to recognize is sometimes if we were to tune
into our own thoughts and our own conversations as those words become verbalized,
we would be shocked to hear how often we are saying things that are not grateful,
that are simply,
they may be a base complaint all the way up to extreme insults.
And in the midst of that,
I think we would all do well to sort of have something that we see it and think,
oh, yeah, I kind of need to
have a little bit of a firewall here.
I should listen to what I’m saying because if it’s not
grateful, that may be a sign it’s time to do some gratefulness practicing.
I think that’s good advice,
Michael.
I have a small thing.
I think it’s a stone with the word
grace painted on it.
I think it was at a youth conference somewhere and it rides with me in my
truck, which is a place I sometimes struggle to be gracious and to be generous toward others.
So that’s certainly a thing we do.
We mentioned journaling already.
Giving, the practice of giving, if you don’t regularly participate in some kind of giving now, and start small.
One of the mistakes we made,
and to your point earlier about being Americans,
is we decide we’re
going to be giving,
so we think that has to be something huge.
And there’s nothing wrong with
big acts, but they’re harder to sustain.
Next time you go to the grocery store for every can
of vegetables you put in your cart,
put in another one that you drop off at the food pantry or bring
back to the church and put in our wagon.
Next time you go out for a meal or order food,
as may more likely be the case right now,
take stock of what that costs you and put that aside to
do something with.
Again, a food pantry or a local ministry.
And it doesn’t have to be extravagant,
Michael.
In fact, I would say that the small steps are the most important because they’re the most
sustainable, and they’re the simplest,
and they’re the easiest way to begin to move forward.
And how could I be generous?
And this demands, as does all spiritual practice, some honesty.
If you’re a person that has a hard time letting go of things,
you’re going to have to work on that.
If you’re a person with some pain in your life and you think,
“I’m not sure God can be trusted,”
you’re going to have to wrestle with that before you’re ready to move into these deeper practices
of generosity and joy and gratitude because that’s going to get in your way.
And you’ll think the
thing getting in your way is,
“Oh, I’m not good at journaling,” or,
“Oh, I forgot to get extra food
for people who might be hungry.” That’s not it.
That’s the symptoms of the deeper problem.
And you’re going to have to examine that deeper problem before you’re going to be able to remedy those symptoms.
The dangerous word and the temptation following this conversation is the word
“but.” But Clint,
I just can’t.
But Clint, you don’t understand.
But Clint, you don’t know what
I’ve gone through.
But Clint, you don’t know that I can’t financially do that.
The ability for us
as humans to self-justify away from gratitude,
away from generosity, is unparalleled.
And I only know that because that’s true for me.
It is so easy to make excuses for why we’re complaining,
for why we have our hands tightly,
tightly clasped.
It’s so easy to,
within our own selves,
justify
closedness in our souls.
And yet what we’re called to is the kind of life of people who live
in the same kind of gratitude that Jesus Christ came and gave Himself for us.
And we can’t possibly live in the shadow of the cross and not be people who practice gratitude.
And every time that word “but” comes up,
but I can’t, we need to be reminded,
yes, you can, not because of your
strength, but because of the one who came for you.
Yeah, I think there’s a part in the New Testament
where Paul talks about our fragrance.
And I think,
not to paint a strange picture,
but when you leave an encounter with someone,
what is the fragrance that lingers?
Have they experienced…
When you go through the checkout line,
when you see a friend at the store,
or when you get the chance to have lunch with somebody,
do they leave that encounter,
or are they left with a sense of your gratitude,
your joyfulness,
your generosity?
Are we able to
think to some degree that as I went through my day today,
I hope I left something that is helpful to
someone else?
Or was I too focused on myself and I missed all those opportunities?
And again,
we’ve all known people who are wonderful at it,
who are beautiful examples of joy and generosity and gratitude.
And I don’t know if we can all get to where they are,
but we can all move ahead of
where we are.
And that’s the point.
And as we try to practice that,
the good news is our faith is deepened,
our faithfulness is strengthened,
and God is glorified in it.
And that’s, again, the point of all of these conversations.
We hope that you are encouraged.
We hope that you’re
challenged to be people who practice gratitude,
that that might work within us joy,
and that might then make us people whose lives are generous.
Friends, we hope that there’s been something
this conversation that has both encouraged and challenged you.
And if you’ve enjoyed it,
if it’s been meaningful,
give it a like,
share it so that other people can find it.
Thank you for joining us so regularly in these podcasts.
We’re glad to have you here.
It’s a real privilege
to have you in the conversation.
We look forward to seeing you next week as we continue on this
conversation about what it means to practice the faith.
Hey, we want to thank you for listening,
and we know this is maybe a hard time to think about gratitude and joy because it’s a season
where we feel like maybe we’ve lost some things.
So we hope there’s a challenge in this for all of
us as we think, you know,
we need to be sure that we’re paying attention to where God has blessed
us.
And as we move forward together,
we’re grateful that you are on the path with us.