Gratitude

This is the season for giving and receiving, so please give up wanting to be thanked. You’re not entitled to gratitude from anyone for anything. If you give in order to receive thanks, your gift is manipulation and not a gift. If you sacrificed to provide for someone expecting them to be grateful, you will be disappointed. If you are waiting for gratitude to be expressed, pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. It could take some time or never come at all.

Gratitude is not the greatest of the virtues; it is the blood that keeps virtues alive. I believe this, but I also know that gratitude cannot be manufactured or contrived. A thankful heart cannot be mandated or demanded. It is very rare.

Even though it’s rare and even though we can’t expect it, when you encounter genuine gratitude it is a steamroller. A daughter who is a new mother calls her mom to thank her for all the dirty diapers and late nights over all those years. An old parishioner drives past the church where the seeds of grace were planted twenty-five years earlier and he tracked down his old minister to thank him. A letter received from an old friend stated that he saw you unfairly treated once and he didn’t stand up for you, and was writing to ask for forgiveness.

God must know this about us. He doesn’t bless us to be thanked, and still he blesses. Even if our gratitude glass is fairly empty. But I imagine his heart singing over those rare occasions when the sinner who, after carrying shame and guilt for years, lifts her heart in praise and washes his feet with her tears of gratitude. The leper who was so overwhelmed that his sick body was miraculously healed that he dared disobey Jesus’ direct order to report to the priests and turned back to fall at his feet completely grateful. The teenage boy who, at the invitation of some TV preacher, a Southern Baptist preacher no doubt, knelt to ask God to show that he is real is filled with gratitude, even forty years later, that God would have such a mess in his family.

Gratefully,

Chuck Collins