Prayers of Thanksgiving in a Cynical, Critical World

[This is the final installment of my follow-up emails I've sent to parents of the 3rd to 6th graders in my Wednesday night class. We just finished a 6-week module on prayer.]

Vocatus atque non vocatus, dues aderit.

“Bidden or unbidden, God is present” – Erasmus

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job 1:21b

Friends,

I am once again a few days late in composing and sending this email, but I think that it’s alright, since this entire week should flow well into last week’s lesson. On Wednesday, we concluded our six-week prayer module by discussing prayers of thanksgiving. (We’ll start a new module a week from Wednesday.) What a timely way to end our consideration of some of the different ways to imagine and practice prayer.

When things are at there best in my life, when I am the most spiritually nourished and the most in tune with myself, others, and God, I am practicing the spiritual disciplines, following a ‘rule of life’ that guides my training as an apprentice of Jesus and opens my life to the Spirit’s transformative presence. As a part of that rule, I try to intentionally cultivate the spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving in my life by: taking at least two minutes a day to pause to offer thanksgiving to God for blessings great and small, mundane and extraordinary; providing spiritual encouragement for another person each week; and providing a word of encouragement to someone daily.

I will be the first to admit that this is not an easy quality to cultivate. In fact, it’s time for confession. I have been struggling with a mini-depression over the past few months because the thanksgiving and encouragement have slipped out of my regular habit of disciplines! As I’ve been reflecting on my life and my spiritual health over the past week, I’ve realized that part of my current struggles are due to my inability to recognize God’s presence at all times, my inability to cultivate thankfulness and gratitude in all things.

Let’s be honest. It seems that most everything in our society conspires against that practice: television shows, commercials, billboards, water-cooler conversations at work, and dinner conversations at church small groups. It is difficult to navigate this labyrinth of ingratitude and find ourselves centered in thankfulness. A loss of thankfulness and gratitude plagues our lives and our families, and it has taken a destructive toll our churches, not to mention society at large. I can easily imagine reinterpreting Jesus’ parable about the soils in Mark 4 so that it speaks to the struggle of growing and sustaining seeds of thankfulness in our world today:

“The sower is the Spirit of God, tossing the seeds of thankfulness onto the hearts of God’s children. The seed that falls on the path are trampled underfoot by ingratitude and eaten by the birds of the comparison and critique. The seed that falls on the rocky ground struggles to find nourishing Living Water. The soil is shallow with no depth, and so are its roots. It sprouts quickly and looks promising, but then the sun of sarcasm and cynicism rises from the east. Its scorching heat bears down on the struggling sprout, and it quickly withers away to nothing. Other seed falls among the thorns of consumerism. For a short time sprout and the thorny weeds grow together and coexist. But in short time the thorns of discontent grew up, overtaking the seedlings of thankfulness, as the thorns of the cares of the world, the lure of wealth, the feelings of entitlement, and the insatiable desire for the latest and greatest toys and televisions, gadgets and golf clubs, cars and computers choke all life out of thankfulness. (There’s a good reason that the Friday after Thanksgiving Thursday has been affectionately dubbed “Black Friday”!) The good, fertile soil is constantly tended and watered and nurtured and weeded to protect the delicate seed, to curb critical tendencies, to treasure and value people as gifts, and to receive every experience and every thing as a gift rather an entitlement, a blessing rather than a right. The seeds of thankfulness take root there and grow into a living and active presence of God in all moments, experiences, and things. They blossom into a beautiful harvest in the midst of a bleak and barren world.”

The thankful heart requires constant nurture and cultivation, yet it carries with it an incredibly transformative potential. The potential is because gratitude helps us to realize and recognize that God is present. Thankfulness is rooted in the reality that “bidden or unbidden, God is present.” Adele Calhoun was correct when she wrote that “thankfulness is a thread that can bind together all the patchwork squares of our lives. Difficult times, happy days seasons of sickness, hours of bliss—all can be sewn together into something lovely with the thread of thankfulness.” If there is anything that our children, and all of us for that matter, need to remember, it’s that thanksgiving is possible because God is present, not because everything goes perfectly or the way that we would like or envision or imagine.

Take some time today to reflect on your own life. Where do you need to grow in thankfulness? Spend time reflecting on these questions from Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us:

• How are you addicted to criticism, analysis and negativity? How might thankfulness be an antidote to a critical spirit?
• When have you found that in retrospect you could have been thankful for something that you were not grateful for at the time it was happening? How can this perspective inform your life now?
• How has a grateful person affected your own vision of what matters in life? How has someone who lives out of bitterness affected your life?
• How does your disposition influence your attitude toward gratitude?

Prayers of gratitude and thankfulness have the power and potential to bring healing to our churches, to bring hope to shattered relationships, to resurrect struggling marriages, and to bring new creation to our own dead and lifeless souls. It is a cure for cynicism, salve for sarcasm, a balm for our discouragement. It has the power to liberate us from the suspicion that holds us captive and to bring us to the Promised Land of joyful life in the Spirit of God. (Can’t you just imagine the incredible ways that thankfulness can help cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives!)

This week, in the midst of feasting on turkey and pumpkin pie, watching football, succumbing to the powers of tryptophan and serotonin, take some time to practice the discipline of thankfulness. Give some thanks on Thanksgiving! Try to practice one or more of the following spiritual exercises alone or together with your family this “turkey day.” (These have been modified and adapted from Calhoun.)

• Develop a family thanksgiving journal. Spend time together listing and recording the incredible gifts of God that have come to you this past year in the form of people, experiences, blessings, struggles, challenges, successes, and failures. (Or create a scrapbook with photos and pictures. Write short prayers of thanksgiving next to each one.) Spend some time thinking and talking about how these things have changed you and what it means that God has been present in all of them.
• Read Psalm 136 together as a family. Choose one person to read the first half of each verse and then have everyone respond together: “His steadfast love endures for ever!” Continue with your own litany of praise, inviting everyone in the family to call out something for which they are thankful. After each one, everyone in the group should respond, “His steadfast love endures forever!”
• Write a letter of thanks to someone who has touched your life in the past year, the past month, and the past. If you do this together as a family, take time to prayer for each person, thanking God for each person by name and thanking God for being present in your lives through each of those people.
• What sorts of things tend to encourage you in thankfulness? Praise songs? Worship? Prayer? Time spent with friends? Time alone in solitude and reflection? Giving and receiving presents? Helping the poor or disenfranchised? What tends to discourage you or make thankfulness more difficult? When do you sense comparison, sarcasm, cynicism, and discontentment taking root in your soul? Plan ways to incorporate the things that encourage thankfulness into your life on a regular basis. Try to find ways to remove the things that are an impediment to having thankful heart.
• Hold a thank-you party. Invite the people you want to honor with a thank you. Create and send out personalized invitations and spend the time celebrating and honoring them. (It might be a little uncomfortable for them at the time, but I think that they’ll leave being incredibly blessed and encouraged!)
• Notice your tendency to make comparisons that result in feelings of dissatisfaction or entitlement. Practice abstaining from comparative statements about what you don’t have. Instead give thanks for what you do have.

Whatever else you may do this week, take advantage of the chance to give thanks! Help cultivate a spirit of thanksgiving in your children. May God help us all as we grow in thankfulness.