Looking More Closely

            Shout joyfully to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with jubilation; Come before Him with rejoicing. Know that the Lord Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. ... (Psalm 100: 1)

Let the peace of Christ, to which you were indeed called in one body, rule in your hearts; and be thankful. (Colossians 3:15)

I’m listening to one book about gratitude, and I’m reading another. The first frustrates me because the authors discuss reasons – often difficult reasons – to be thankful. It has taken me to nearly three-quarters of the way through the book to begin to relax with it, which probably means I should listen to it again someday. The second book is about a man who was challenged to write a thank you note each day. He describes the changes that took place in his heart and world produced by his actions. I have found that one more practical, but neither of them are what I wanted to find.

To be honest, I was looking for a book that would put “gratitude” on a table and let me examine it, compare it to the whatever that I am feeling or doing (or whatever one does with gratitude) What are the foundations on which it’s built? How does it function? How can I tell if I am being grateful enough? Or when I’m not being grateful at all?  

And, to be honest, as I think about what I’ve written in the past several days about gratitude, I recognize that I’m doing my own version of the first book I mentioned. And not surprisingly, my reading in Renovation of the Heart (Dallas Willard), he wrote about “death of self,” and warned that self-mortification can become the goal, our way of proving how much we deserve God’s blessing. It can become the means of worshipping and being grateful to ourselves rather than the means of growing closer to our Father.

And the gratitude (or anything else) on the table so I can examine it and determine my level of success and failure is the same thing. It puts me in charge. It lets me pat myself on the back or flagellate my mind. It makes me God. Or maybe it makes a god named “Gratitude.” What it does not do is produce gratitude. At the same time, some idea of the mechanics of gratitude might be useful.

So, with what I hope is an abundance of caution, I’m going to share a couple ideas that I hope are so obvious that we all missed them. One of the requirements for gratitude is attention. We must notice or be aware of something before we can be grateful for it. Sometimes, God reflects the moon in the windshield of a car so it is visible from inside the house. He can and does produce “showstoppers” that catch our attention while we’re busy doing other things. We certainly don’t want to miss those, but the moon that you see for the few minutes it’s in the right place, at the right angle to reflect in the car window is in the sky even when it doesn’t reflect in the car window. We might notice if our attention weren’t focused on our computer screens, our telephones, or TV.

Noticing takes time. It takes a certain level of distraction. I’ve told before that when I was jogging, it took me as long as 3 miles before I finally stopped carrying people, things, and other distractions and negatives with me. That was the case enough though every step along the way, I was signing a song that includes the line “And step by step You’ll lead me…” I’m sure that we could improve our ability to shift our attention better than that, but the point is that it takes either something that catches our attention, or however much time it takes to extricate ourselves from stuff.

The other important idea about gratitude is that quite often, we recognize gratitude as an emotion. Emotions both produce energy, and they consume energy. The spike of gratitude that one feels when something happens is like adrenaline. We feel grateful. That feeling continues for a time, if we pay attention to it, but slowly, it ebbs away. It can even leave us feeling tired and drained, just like we do when we use physical energy. It would be exhausting to feel grateful all the time. Being a grateful person might be better thought of as being a person who is open to gratitude. Gratitude is a response, not a task.

On the other hand, gratitude is a habit. The more you act on your gratitude, the easier it will be to act on it more. But beware the line where you start practicing gratitude in order to pat yourself on the back for being grateful, or to be seen as being grateful.