Gratitude is Wonder-ful
My esteemed and former mentor Jeff Liu delivered this past Sunday's message on gratitude, quoting from Psalm 147:1 – "Praise the LORD! For it is good to sing praises to our God; for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting" (emphasis mine).
Gratitude is something of a church-y word; that is, its use is often restricted to church-y circles and its meaning thereby, sometimes, artificially constrained to the "spiritual" or "religious" realm. It's this idea that "gratitude" is a "spiritual" discipline and that it takes a certain level of "spiritual maturity" to be "grateful."
Or maybe you don't identify with that at all and this is just me broadcasting online how tough it is to integrate spiritual reality with day to day reality. (See? I almost introduced an artificial distinction again! Whoops.)
But the point is – and this is one big takeaway I had from Jeff's exploration of what gratitude looks like – that practicing gratitude is an exercise that can extend into every area of life.
"Duh." Well of course that's true, one might say. But here's the angle to gratitude I'd never really noticed before, but that once it was pointed out to me had the "duh"-ness that true truth often has.
And the angle is this: that gratitude includes, at a basic level, getting excited about the world (which entails recognizing that there's a whole lot to get excited about). Or maybe "excited" isn't quite the right word — it's something closer to wonder, or amazement. The picture that comes to mind is when a little kid's eyes go wide because he's just seen something he's never seen before and it blows his mind. There's a whole lot of reality that we often miss because we take it for granted, but once we put in a little effort to see it, it can be really pretty wonder-ful.
But wonder doesn't always have to be expressed by wide-eyed-ness. (You'd look pretty absurd if you walked around expressing gratitude by having your eyes open as wide as they could all the time — not to mention you'll dry out your corneas.) So here are a few ways sophisticated & mature adults* like you and I can practice some gratitude.
I know that when it's institutionally enforced via the public-schooling-education-system, learning isn't usually the most gripping task, but the kind of learning that engenders an attitude of gratitude extends beyond (but also includes) academic knowledge.
One aspect of gratitude — seeing more of what's true — includes learning more about, or even just pausing to consider the crazy improbability of, the world around us.
Somewhere to start, for example, is with the existence of the universe. If you're familiar with some of the philosophical arguments for theism, you probably know about the Teleological Argument: there are a number of constants finely tuned to within absurdly small ranges that permit the existence of matter as we know it. And as for you? Add to that vanishingly small probability the even more vanishingly small probability that innumerable factors would lead through millennia (or at the very least, a couple thousand years, depending on whom you ask) to your parents meeting each other and then to your fragile fetus incubating properly for nine months before being violently ejected into a painful, cold, astoundingly bright world where you're utterly helpless for at least the first eighteen months (or maybe utterly helpless for the first eighteen years, depending on who we're talking about) and the reality of your existence here and now is absolutely astounding, if you stop long enough to think about it.
Another way to express gratitude and (un)bend ourselves to the plumb line of truth and reality, is to look for ways to get excited about something that isn't you: Get excited talking about your testimony, about what you learned in DT this morning, or how the message spoke to you, or how God did something and you saw it. If you have a little self-knowledge it'll be quickly apparent how crazy it is that the Almighty and Transcendent God moved through history to love you and bind Himself to you as your own Father. Get excited telling stories about how cool the other people in your life are. Get excited nerding out about sociology or neurology or chemistry or some piece of literature you just read and couldn't put down. Learn something excellent about how much work goes into the rice we take for granted, or about the mechanism by which your body converts that into the energy that literally keeps you going. Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy — think about (and express) these things, says the Apostle.
And lastly, find spaces to notice how tiny each one of us really is. For me, that's whenever I look out on the ocean. I look out to the horizon and just see water — and then I realize that that expanse just goes on and on for thousands of miles and I can barely fathom it.** There's something freeing about realizing how incredibly, wonderfully small we are — it magnifies God's love for us that much more when we orient ourselves rightly.
When we open our eyes and minds to the grace that has been lavished on us, that not only has an infinity of things gone right to permit our continued existence, but that we should be called (and thereby actually become) children of the Most High God, we are beginning to bend our minds to beautiful and wonderful truths — and bending to truth is really just straightening ourselves out.
“What is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over all the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet.”
Have a happy thanksgiving!
*If you don’t agree, please re-read that line with a tinge of sarcasm.
**Haha. Pun totally intended.
Josh de la Paz (class of 2019, Berkeley a2f) is a card-carrying biochem nerd, a professional software tester, and now, apparently, an amateur blog writer. In his free time, he likes cooking, singing while walking around the house, and taking long walks through nature.