WORKING TOWARDS GRATITUDE | KAIROS GLOBAL | DECEMBER 2023

Author: Sonia Kurian

Intro: Gratefulness is seeing that each day is already provided for and in the hands of God, and living our day with the ease and confidence that trust provides, writes Sonia Kurian. 

Gratefulness is quite the buzzword these days. People talk about how their lives change by simply keeping gratitude journals, jotting down maybe 5 things they are grateful for every morning for 30 days, or taking 5 min a day to reflect on and call out some things they are grateful for and so on. Most folks I’ve seen do this, seem to be struck by how difficult it seems to even find things to list when they first start, but once they’ve done it for a while, they find they have too many things to list, and often even get better at identifying more things throughout the day that they’re grateful for as it happens. I often think this is the quintessential example of how just learning to shift your worldview can shift your sense of contentment and anxiety about life, and how good it is to know that you can learn it as a habit, you don’t have to be born with the naturally grateful genomic code in your DNA! 

Perhaps many of us know at least one ‘Debbie Downer’ in our lives – someone with the uncanny ability to pinpoint something wrong with your news – even if that were good news – finding something negative, something to complain about. It only takes a handful of conversations with such persons to learn for yourself, how differently people see and approach the world. For us as Christians, it is important to ask ourselves, how does God desire us to see the world and go about our days? All of us have our own natural temperaments and perhaps we are natural optimists, pessimists or realists. I’m sure the Lord accounts for this in each of our salvations, but he also seems to clearly teach us to learn to look at the world with a particular lens. 

It takes only a cursory look at the NT to see what this worldview that God is trying to teach us is. Jesus gives us the parable of the ten lepers and points out the one who comes back with gratitude. He also reminds us to not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. (Matthew 6:34). Notice even in the Our Father, Jesus reminds us to ask each day for that daily bread, not bread for tomorrow or even the day after. But this advice isn’t just given to us as a random mandate, rather the Matthew verse is preceded by several other verses that tell us why we shouldn’t be anxious – because of how much our Father in heaven cares for us. 

In fact, it’s not just in the NT, but in the OT as well, that we see God trying to teach us who he is, so we can trust him, and learn to live our lives with gratitude, rather than anxiety. One of my favourite passages on this is Wisdom 16: 26-29:

That your children whom you loved might learn, O LORD, that it is not the various kinds of fruits that nourish, but your word that preserves those who believe you! For what was not destroyed by fire, melted when merely warmed by a momentary sunbeam; to make known that one must give you thanks before sunrise, and turn to you at daybreak. For the hope of the ungrateful melts like a wintry frost and runs off like useless water.

In this entire chapter in fact, the author points out how God took care of the Israelites, in every hardship they went through, even things they would be impossible to get out of, transforming those moments for their own good. In this above verse, he highlights God’s gift of manna to the Israelites as the sign of God providing for their day to day needs, with tenderness and daily remembrance of his people. Notice just like in the Our Father, how each day is provided for, and tomorrow’s worry is left in the trustworthy hands of God. I love how this passage calls out that the daily need to collect manna before sunrise, indicated to God’s people by how they were meant to wake up before sunrise and praise God before anything else. Gratefulness appears to be how we are meant to begin every day – looking at this new day, seeing that it is already provided for and in the hands of God, and living our day with the ease and confidence that trust provides.

It’s not just that God asks this of his people blindly, but rather he provides the evidence of his goodness and trustworthiness throughout his walk with Israel and right into the NT. Throughout the gospels, Jesus makes great effort to reveal to us the true nature of the Christian God. He tells us of the Father who takes great care in tending to the sparrow, the grass that fades, the lily of the valley, a Father who ran to meet and forgive his prodigal son, lavishly sows seeds among all the soil of the land, and is above all, good to his children (Matthew 10:29-31;Matthew 7:11; Luke 15:11-32). If he cares so lavishly for things that pass away tomorrow, Jesus asks us to think ...are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? (Matthew 6:26-27). 

I think this is key to understanding how to become a grateful people. Think of it as two sides of the same coin. In order to possess the coin of gratefulness, we must come to trust and believe two things – that God is good and trustworthy in himself, and that he is good to us, because of how precious we are to him. Ask yourself how much you actually believe these two things? How many of us struggle to let go of anything, even small things, into the hands of God? How many of us believe he desires good things for us? How many of us trust him to act on our behalf, or do we instead see him as a trickster, and as someone who cheats us out of our desires?

These are real, tough questions. Questions we don’t need to be afraid of, because they are echoed in the cry of Job when his life was brought to square one, of Hannah when she is judged by even the priests of God, of Elizabeth in her unexpected pregnancy and Zachariah’s sufferings. You don’t have to turn too many pages in the Bible to find a heart that cries out like your own. And yet in all these circumstances, God reminds us who he is. He doesn’t often give us a master plan of how he plans to get us out of our predicament, perhaps he doesn’t want to ruin the surprise for us. But he always reminds us of who he is; as if to say that of all people, he is the only one truly in control, truly able to change things we think impossible, truly able to make all things new. Jesus too reminds us who God is constantly – near to the broken-hearted, not afraid to suffer in his own body for our sake, closer to us than we are to ourselves as St Augustine said. 

This revelation should inspire in ourselves a trust in God, in his goodness that sometimes we don’t understand or see in the moment, and often only in retrospect. This trust is what inspires the saints to relax and let go, to be able to trust that even when they fail to plan, God has their back. This confidence allows them to be grateful and see the blessings of God not just when things are going great, but even when things look bad. They can possess the ‘peace that passes all understanding’ when they know God will always win in the end. This is how we get saints like St John of the Cross who composed love poems to God, while being imprisoned by his own religious brothers. And in the end, it turned out John of the Cross was no fool – rather he saw with the eyes of God, and thus turned out to be right! We need to ask ourselves, do we trust God to see for us when we are blind and can only see up to the horizon?

This is the only way we can begin to stand on steady ground, when we stand on the rock that is God. I encourage you, if you struggle with this, to ask God to teach you to trust in him, and he will. When I prayed this prayer, finding myself at the end of all the things I could humanly do, and still unable to let go of my need to control all things, I found myself having to admit that I did not trust him enough to let anything go. And once I could admit that, I had no choice but to ask him to teach me this thing I did not know – teach me to trust him. And the great news is that he did! He led me step by step into learning to trust him in little things and from there to trust him in bigger things and eventually he proved himself so reliable that I would be the idiot to not trust in him. Standing on that foundation of trust in God, made it much easier for me to carry my daily yoke with lightness and trust in my Father. Carrying my yoke with ease allowed me to notice the many ways that the Lord arranged good things for me, in every day, each day moving one step closer to an answer that I often wouldn’t understand till months later, when the Lord pointed out what he did. How quickly we move on from one problem to the next, failing to even realise God did something beautiful in our lives. Are we not like the Israelites who are freed from slavery, only to then turn around and complain about the lack of meat? 

Let our journey towards gratefulness be a daily reminder to us, that it is we who are faithless and fickle, and the Lord who is faithful. He who remembers every sigh of our heart, even prayers we forgot we prayed, and we who forget the mountains he moved for us in prayer. He who stands for our truest good, when we so easily compromise for much less. May we learn to be grateful, if only as a momentary triumph of faithfulness to a God who never leaves our side. May our seeing of the goodness of God poured out, be a consolation to our Lord so cruelly mocked and reviled in the world today. May we become a joy to him, as we learn of his joy in us. May we begin to see on earth what we will see clearly in Heaven – Lord, who could ever praise you enough? (Psalm 106:2).

Sonia Kurian lives in Houston, USA and is a clinical systems analyst in the healthcare sector. Her interests include writing, reading, iconography and animated karaoke sessions.