Thank you notes are interesting social graces in our society. Many folks these days don’t even take the time to write them, and when they do, they do it via email or quick handwritten note that looks like it what it was: checking a box, one more task accomplished on someone’s to-do list. When you receive it, you open it, glance at it, and put it in the trash with the other junk. It’s just a simple pleasantry, an exchange with little meaning, the written version of the “good morning” or the “how are you?” you get from the passing acquaintance in the aisle at the grocery store.
Have you ever received a really great thank you note, though? One that was clearly intentionally written? One where the author (and, it was so good you could actually call them an “author”) seemed to look into your soul, searching for something that they truly admired and appreciated about you, and pulled it out, lifted it up for both of you to dwell upon, for one brief instant, two people joined together in deep appreciation of a quality or character or grace or gift that only one of you had?
That note was a keeper. That one is probably still in a drawer somewhere. Maybe, when you’re feeling down or depressed or discouraged, you pull that one out to encourage you. Whatever it was that you gave the author of that note, whatever you did to prompt him or her to write it, it pales in value to the preciousness of the appreciation that note represents to you.
The difference between the “throw away” and the “keeper” is gratefulness: the gratefulness of the author. As we’ve talked about before in these pages, gratefulness is not primarily a feeling. It’s not something I experience when I have everything I want or need, but a choice to be glad and joyful for the things that God has given me. Gratefulness is a spiritual discipline. Like Bible study. Like prayer. Like accountability. Like fasting. Gratefulness is making the decision to be thankful and to consciously see the opportunities in the life and the mission you’ve been given. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
And, like other disciplines, the more I practice it, the more I obediently think of things to be grateful for, the more automatic gratefulness becomes. Gratefulness brings joy; joy brings a heart welling up in commitment to holiness and righteousness. Like I’ve said before, passion follows obedience. That’s why I’m a big believer that gratefulness is the pathway to righteousness and holiness.
But, I’ve been thinking that gratefulness is not just something I have, or get; it’s a precious gift, as well. Is there any greater way to love others than to truly express gratefulness for them? When Christ commands us to love others, even those, maybe especially those, who we find difficult to love, can we even do that without first finding something in them, or about their circumstances, for which we are grateful? If we were to find that thing, buried deep in there as it may be, and bring it out, shine it, and hold it up for them to see, might that transform both them and us? Might gratefulness be even more powerful when expressed not just for the easy, “low-hanging fruit” of friends, family, and stuff that brings us happiness, but the “high-hanging fruit” of difficult people, challenges, and stuff that builds our character and faith?
So, I’m grateful for the work of my precious friends, my fellow teachers and administrators at my school, and for their work in the life of my girls and their friends. I’m grateful for 13 years of families, people who have become my best friends in the whole world, as we have had the privilege to be used by God to build something great together: this school. I’m grateful for God taking our acts of sometimes faltering, whiny, but ongoing obedience to build a great school, a great community, and a great people. I’m thankful for my wife and my kids.
But, I’m also grateful for a changing world. I’m grateful for people who don’t think like me. I’m grateful for people who think that I’m a closed-minded bigot for the way I think. I’m grateful for an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone, to reach out to people who aren’t like me, to try to understand, to be understood, and to love anyway when I’m not. I’m grateful for the chance to actually fulfill the Great Commission that Christ commanded me to engage in, and to try to figure out how to love with “grace AND truth,” the way that Christ loved.
I’m grateful that God is using an increasingly non-Judeo-Christian society to discipline His children, to shake us out of our comfortable, socially-acceptable Christianity, and make us stand for who we are and what we believe. I’m grateful that He’s turning up the heat to draw us to Him, as He has with His beloved Church for millennia. I’m grateful that He finally thinks I’m worthy of a little heat, and I’m praying that He gives me the grace and strength and patience and wisdom and perseverance to love Him and serve Him well in this new normal. I’m trusting in Him to give those things to me, and I’m going to be grateful for them when He does.
I’m praying that for you, too, by the way. You can thank me later.
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