Can
we give thanks in all things? There is a time I would have said no. I used to
ask with the wrong attitude, why didn’t God take care of this? Why did He allow
that to happen? I felt smug in my self-righteousness. After all, I was a victim
in many situations—receiving injustice when I didn’t deserve it. If God really loved
me, He would fix this or solve that, unless He abandoned me, too. A thankless
heart grieves the Holy Spirit, hurting not only our relationship with God but
also others. We feel it in our emotions—bitterness, anger, and depression.
Gratitude
is a strange gift. The more we are thankful, the more we remember things for
which we are thankful. One of my most memorable moments of gratitude came when
I was in the eighth grade. I lost my notes for a major term paper. I didn’t know
the cards were missing until my final class and the bell rang to be dismissed. I
panicked. I ran down the hall into one class after another, checking my desk for
the missing notes. Each time when they weren’t there, more tears filled my
eyes. The dozens of hours of work I had put into those cards flashed before me
and redoing all that work sickened me. Inside the last desk I checked, I found my
stack of notecards.
I
wrapped my arms around them and smiled, thanking God for helping me to find
them. Tears flowed—not tears of sadness but tears of joy. I was a straight “A”
student and the thought of those cards being lost forever was enough to send me
into a tailspin of deep depression.
Recently
I got to thinking about those cards. Much has happened since that day almost
forty years ago. Now that I am a little older and a little grayer, I have
accumulated many notes—for different kinds of term papers. We are living notes
for God’s Book of Remembrance. Some of those notes I didn’t want to write and
would gladly have thrown them away. They were about topics I never would have
chosen, but God had different plans.
My
notecards have included lessons about disappointment, heartache, failure, worry, depression,
fear, and insecurity. Why couldn’t God have given me easier topics—like how to
live like a millionaire? I would have donated lots of money. I could handle
that one. As the years have passed—and they go by faster the older I get—missing
from some of those cards written long ago was one important word—gratitude. Did
I really want to thank God for the husband who abandoned me and married his
pregnant girlfriend? Did I really want to thank God for my barrenness? Did I
really want to thank God for the twenty years I spent in a profession I hated?
God
has taken me down many paths I didn’t like. During most of those years, I did
not have a heart of gratitude. I needed to learn that before God could use me completely,
I needed to surrender to Him completely. Anything we hold back in our lives and
put before God is an idol. God can’t use us as He would like to if we don’t
surrender all to Him in obedience. Otherwise, we will not be able to glorify Him fully
but we will be too busy seeking our own selfish ambitions. We may not even
realize it or do it intentionally.
Look
at Hollywood, scan the self-help books, listen to the news, read the top
stories on the internet—what blessings can the world give us with its
self-centered, “I”-focused mentality? If I had continued to be like the world, to which I was drawn, I never could have glorified God, and you wouldn’t
receive a blessing for God’s work in me.
I
am thankful God didn’t give me all that I wanted when I was young. I would
still be an insecure, fearful, performance-driven individual, seeking my self-worth
from the world. How could God use me with that kind of mindset? The hard things
God put in my life did great work once I surrendered to Him. He humbled me
and showed me His omnipotent power and infinite wisdom.
I
cringe when I think of what kind of a mother I would have been to my kids if
God had given me children when I was married—a co-dependent, insecure wife seeking
all her self-worth from her husband. Talk about dysfunctional in today’s psychological
terms—I was clueless about what it meant to be a Christian wife or a Christian mother.
Today
I thank God for the divorce that brought me to my knees. I honestly think I
loved my husband more than I loved God. I just didn’t know it. I recommitted my
life to Jesus Christ. God became my husband and my provider.
Growing
up in a single family without a father was hard. Being fatherless opened the
door for my stepfather to adopt me when I was ten. His adoption of me paved the
way for a deeper understanding of what it means to be adopted by my heavenly
Father.
My
barrenness became a blessing—I adopted two beautiful daughters from Asia, and
the only one who loves them more than I do is God Himself.
I
could never see the value of my job as a court reporter. How would God ever use
all of those words I wrote involving lawsuits that had no lasting or eternal
value? Why didn’t God allow me to pursue my dreams of becoming an author? Did
He not put those dreams in my heart? Only when I prayed to God to make me more
thankful for the job I hated did God give me something more fulfilling. Those court-reporting
skills gave me the foundation for a later career in broadcast captioning,
allowing me to work from home while raising my two adopted daughters. Now that
I have time to write, I can pursue the passion to write God gave me—but in His
timing, not mine.
When
I was young, I looked at the destination, not the process, but it is in the
process we grow and become like God. If the process had no meaning, God could
have snapped His fingers and made us perfect right away. Wouldn’t that have
been much more efficient and saved a lot of time? But God didn’t want to do it
that way.
Why? It’s in the
process that we glorify God. What is more beautiful than to see a man
or a woman who has overcome great adversity give praise to Jesus Christ? We’ve
all seen it—and we stand amazed. How easy it is to forget God’s passion. He sacrificed
His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, so why would God withhold anything good
from us? There is a mystery in it, but at the center is God. The joy is in the journey
itself and all the opportunities He gives us along the way to glorify Him.
If
our attitude towards the hard things glorifies God, we will be fulfilled. As Paul
says in Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” In the end,
we are most content when we’re filled with God because our true joy can only be
found in Him—not in this world. Everything else not of God will fade away and soon
be forgotten.
It is in the struggle
and my inability to do anything without God that I see His power at work. I am
like a helpless worm, but God comes alongside and lifts me up when I fall. More
than once, He has sent friends to me when I needed encouragement. Scripture instructs
me each day, and prayer draws me into sweet communion.
When I enter heaven’s
gates, God will wipe away my tears. Until then, I will write, hoping to use
those cards of suffering to point people to the One who is the Source of all Hope
and the Giver of all Joy. The cross is my symbol of remembrance. If I had not
given my “all” to God, I never would have seen redemption in the hard things.
Perspective is everything. God never wastes anything.
As it says in Philippians 4:8, “…Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if
there be any praise, think on these things.”
Only through God’s
grace could I find hope when I had no hope. Thankfully, God never gave up on me
even though I tried to give up on myself. He changed my perspective, showed me His
unconditional love, and helped me to be thankful for even those things I hated.
God lessened my pain and brought Godly friends into my life. In Jesus I found freedom
to love and forgive. With a grateful heart, I found God at work in all those
things I once despised, and for that, I am thankful.
