Living Out Our Gratitude

When Heather asked me to write about gratitude for this month, I immediately responded yes, primarily because I love to write!  To be honest, I didn’t even really think about the topic all that much initially.  WRITE?  Yes, please.

Then I sat down to do some pre-writing and processing and realized not long into the process that I may or may not have much to contribute to this conversation.  It seemed like perhaps the word “gratitude” is just a code word for “thankfulness” for an increasingly Godless society which doesn’t know who exactly to thank for the good things in life.  

Obviously I know generally what the word means.  But as I continued to go through a process of “how to understand a word I don’t truly and deeply understand”, it became more clear to me what the difference is, although not initially.  I used a dictionary to find a definition (“the quality of being thankful” - not super helpful), a thesaurus to find synonyms (“thankfulness” was on the list, surprise, surprise…) and antonyms (a rather horrifying list really of unpleasant words), a Google search to find the etymology of “gratitude” (Latin gratus meaning… drumroll, please… “thankful”), and then decided to look at song lyrics from a song I’ve heard on the radio frequently lately.  Brandon Lake’s “Gratitude” finally made that proverbial lightbulb go on over my head as something clicked!

Looking back the next morning at some of my scribblings on the back of a piece of junk mail, I saw that the concept of what I’d been digging for had been there all along really.  The definition I had written down but kind of skimmed over included another part besides just the “quality of being thankful” - it also said, “readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.”  The Latin explanation had also included the word goodwill.  Taking a closer look with new eyes at the 14 synonyms I’d found in the thesaurus and jotted down, a few leaped off the page at me now, “response, requital, praise, indebtedness, obligation”.  

The key thing that was making gratitude different from thankfulness in my increasingly perceptive mind was this: you are compelled to a physical response.  Brandon Lake’s responses include singing, throwing up his hands, praising God again and again, a heart singing “Hallelujah”, arms stretched wide, and worship.  While I was doing this researching and thinking about this word, I kept hearing a voice saying in my head, “Show some gratitude” in a parental-sounding stern voice, although I’m not sure I could identify it specifically as either one of my parents necessarily, and I realized in this epiphany that with gratitude, comes a sense of obligation.

Gratitude is not just an emotion or a sit back on the couch and cuddle it in my thoughts kind of feeling.  Gratitude means that I need to reach back to the person who made me thankful somehow and show him or her my appreciation of their contribution to my life.  Maybe it’s an oral expression: I simply say, “Thank you for what you did.  I appreciate it.”  Perhaps it’s more than that - a written expression that I mail to them or hand to them.  I may feel like I want to return their kindness in some way by giving them something physically in return - a loaf of homemade bread as a sign of thanks for someone giving my daughter a ride to ballet class.  Maybe we want to return a favor for the person in return to reciprocate their thoughtfulness toward us.

“ Gratitude means that I need to reach back to the person who made me thankful somehow and show him or her my appreciation of their contribution to my life.”

And I think that’s why gratitude toward God can feel a bit overwhelming sometimes; we aren’t sure what to do with it.  Our responses feel inadequate no matter what we do or how we try to express how much we treasure what God has done for us.  

Praise and worship can - and should - flow from us, and perhaps we also take that need to respond to another level of trying to pass on the kindness and goodness of God to someone else - a fellow human or charity organization - with our time, action, or money.  We put our gratitude into action.  That, in a nutshell, is exactly what God wants us to do.  As you look at the gratitude calendar from Joyful Journeys, think about ways that appeal to you to express your indebtedness to God and how you can take your gratitude that’s just darting around looking for a way to express itself, and put it into your routines and rhythms this month!