All Good Gifts Around Us

While shopping yesterday, I noticed small boxes of white lights featured on a shelf in the front of the store. Then, looking for candles, I discovered that many had been sold out.

Where I live in the northern hemisphere, light is slowly slipping out of the morning and afternoon skies. Tomorrow, the end of daylight savings time will accelerate the feeling that we’re entering darkness. This year, that darkness feels even more pressing. We’re isolated, and weighed down by social strife and division. Holiday planning that sometimes lightens our spirits is fraught with uncertainty.

It’s time to think about pushing back the dark.

White lights are good; candles are good. And I invite you to join me in another dark-fighting tool: thankfulness.

Thankfulness is not wishful thinking or denial of what’s hard and hurtful in this world and in our lives. It’s acknowledgement that those hardships come with gifts to help us sustain them, gifts that surround us but that we sometimes fail to recognize. Thankfulness helps me recognize, again, that I’m an undeserving recipient of so much grace. It helps me see through the murky darkness to the good that surrounds me, including the people who contribute so much to my life.

The staple of my thanksgiving practice happens first thing in the morning, when I sit at my desk with a cup of coffee, think over the previous day, and write one thing that I’m thankful for. Sometimes these are specific and tangible (the way a heron landed in the top of a tree, the little happy prance in my dog’s run, a text from one of my children), sometimes broad and transcendent (taking it in that I’ve gotten to live another year in the October splendor of this world.) During the day, I look for these things. The next morning, I choose one and condense it into a few words to write into a small weekly planner. At the end of the year I read over all them, greatly heartened to remember these good gifts, many of which I otherwise would have forgotten. 

Lately, I’m also trying to practice more in-the-moment thankfulness throughout the day. When the voice in my head says “I can’t…” or drips complaining, self-pity, or anxiety, I try to turn off that faucet by converting the thought into “I’m thankful for…” I do a quick survey of what’s good in my world in that moment, see it, and say it out loud. And my inner world changes a little bit.

The more we cultivate thankfulness, the more we see to be thankful for. Thankfulness muscles respond to exercise. 

Of course, the practice of thankfulness isn’t the invention of modern psychology. The Bible is shot through with exhortations to be thankful. It also reveals expressions of thankfulness from people in all kinds of circumstances, happy and hard - Miriam, Hannah, David, Hezekiah, Jonah, Daniel, Ezra, Mary, Anna, a nameless healed leper, Paul. Jesus makes a point of public thanksgiving as he demonstrates how he is turning back the darkness of the world. 

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. (Psalm 106:1)

Thankfulness isn’t just a psychological tool that can increase our happiness. Paying attention to what is good around us can be like tracing a beam of light up to its glorious source. (Thank you, C.S. Lewis, for the image.)

All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above, so thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord, for all his love.

Here’s an invitation: If you’d like to try a thanksgiving activity for the next month, let me know, and I’ll send you a one-page sheet with one short prompt of something to look for and be thankful for each day for 30 days. kristin@emmausbiblicalcounseling.com