Gratitude is an epic teacher.
The season of giving starts with a silky gratitude ganache dripping down the social media vignettes we share. Beautiful Thanksgiving Day. Yummy life. More, please.
The spirit of thanksgiving is a lovely appetizer. An enticing culinary pause to stave off what we always know is hours away—the hot breath of commercialism steaming up the manger scene. And here we are. On the other side of it.
We should do more than celebrate Thanksgiving Day. It’s the perfect time to sustain our grateful hearts. Let’s be thanksgivers.
Beyond being grateful for easy-to-love family, friends, and the immediate blessings in your life, who comes to mind that makes being thankful more of a personal challenge? For instance: Sporadic, often disconnected relationships that can barely survive a short text exchange.
How about people in your life you share less-than-more values with, people you have learned from, worked with, people who have deepened your understanding of yourself and life? How about those people you do not match stride for stride on a daily basis, but you have a life connection that is undeniable and durable? We should seek to honor those relationships with gratitude for the connection we share.
Gratitude can teach us to step beyond our natural affinity for people we easily understand, love, and align with. It can crack the window to understanding more about someone’s journey. Gratitude prepares the heart for more.
And our hearts need preparing. We are complex far beyond what we represent on a social media platform. Our culture can make quite the kitchen mess out of communicating with each other. The cultural guidelines that continue evolving to assure our sensitivity to how a person wants to be seen, approached, and treated does not guarantee that we really see each other. And it doesn’t make it any easier that we are so adept at drawing conclusions about who someone is. Our culture collaborates with human nature relentlessly to make sure we know how to do that very well. But ironically, we are all finding our way through every human’s fair share of messy kitchens.
Being human illuminates our uniqueness beyond anything we claim to stand for. We don’t have to understand or align with everything about a person. We need to see the person. When we quit seeing others as one of a kind, we quit seeing. When we see others as an ideology, we quit hearing how their story is going because we think we know it. We do not.
Ideology has no real resting place in my daily life. My life is not a debate. I do not want to live with my fellow humans based on the premise that “because you think this, you are this kind of person.” I want a live connection. We share the journey together. Our circumstances vary—we choose to live how we each live—but I am capable (thanks to my Creator) and equipped (thanks to my Savior) to connect to where you are as a human right now beyond a cultural directive or political stance. I am looking for humans to love and support.
For example, my neighbors hold to diverse ideologies. They are still my neighbors, and welcome in my home. We see the same waterscape, share a common grove of neighboring trees, traverse the same in-and-out road. We prepare for hurricanes together. Watch the same birds take flight. 
We are at the neighborhood “well” every day. Like the Samaritan woman Jesus talked with in Sychar.
Every conversation has something to be thankful for. It is a beautiful place to start.
You can discover and deepen gratitude on paths other than your own.
This season, I am reaching out to people who I do not see on my path very often, but who I am deeply grateful for—how they impacted my past, and have taken permanent residence in my cherished memories, how they have made me a more introspective human. Those memories, our time together, stands stronger than any ideology that separates us. What I am seeking is the one-on-one dialogue that reclaims what culture’s booming voice tries to talk over every day. Granted, a personal connection comes with risk, but the intrinsic reward will outlive the chance you take.
Are you a thanksgiver? Someone who seeks to sustain a grateful heart. If you claim to be, or want to be, give some consideration to who you will reach out to first.
Join me in making a grateful heart the thing you want most for Christmas. And seek gratitude from people you have not connected with in a while. Eat, shop, sleep, work, seek gratitude, eat, decorate, sleep, work, connect with someone, seek gratitude, eat, shop, work, bake, seek a grateful heart, enjoy family, seek, eat, shop, connect…seek, connect, seek connect… here are a few buoys for our journey, fellow thanksgiver.
Buoy talk.
Gratitude is an epic teacher for the thanksgiver. It is not a cozy couch, or the front porch swing. It’s more like the person sitting next to you on the commute, the person in line in front of you. Gratitude has much to teach the thanksgiver. It doesn’t settle on those you easily love. It deepens for the price of courage and compassion, to be thankful for those you have shared life with. For those you no longer have a regular connection with, or those you see every day but do not connect with, and surprisingly, those who are strangers. Start by being thankful for how they add value to your life, however small, however fleeting. Take on the mindset of Apostle Paul in writing his brothers and sisters in Ephesus.
16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. Ephesians 1:16-17 NIV
Gratitude is a stronghold for the thanksgiver in tough times. Jesus was thankful to God for hearing him when Jesus found his friend Lazarus had been dead for four days. Jesus didn’t ask to raise Lazarus. He thanked his Father for hearing his prayer. Gratitude lays the groundwork for God to work.
41 So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. John 11:41NIV
Gratitude prepares the thanksgiver’s heart for more. Seeking gratitude in our personal connections with others prepares our hearts for love. My love for others comes from God’s love for me. Being a follower of Jesus is not an ideology. It is the intimate experience of being loved, being saved. Loving others grows out of being grateful for how someone brings value to your life.
16 Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 NIV
Gratitude. In all circumstances. ‘Tis the season as we prepare our hearts for the greatest gift.
