Friday, 27 November 2009

• Learning to be Thankful

  One of the most simple and profound pieces of wisdom is a prayer, that was popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous:  "God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference." When there is discussion of accepting ones circumstances, it is normal to think about things like disease, the lost of a loved one, or in some way not living up to a personal expectation.
  
  Yet, I think it is almost just as hard to accept and be thankful for good things in ones life. Even though it is almost cliched to say it, one of the great conundrums for someone who is religious is how to reconcile the existence of a loving God with pain, suffering and perhaps most despicably human evil. To an atheist, this is an ironic proof that God does not exist; as I heard Penn Jillete say, I wonder if the same singers who thank God when they win an award are angry with him when they get into a car accident.
  
  I have struggled with this concept is to fair to be thankful and to praise God for a recovery from illness, when so many do not recover from illness -- as if to say that God in some way chose those who recovered from serious illness myself included over the thousands who don't.  The more I have thought about this, though, the more I have to come realize that thankfulness and gratitude are not spontaneous spurts of joy and excitement in reaction to specific event but a frame of mind. To a believer, even if a blessing is not the result of a specific divine intervention, it is in a very real a gift of God. As the Apostle said:"Neither(referring to God) is worshiped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things....For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."

  One of my favorite writers Elie Wiesel suffered through a holocaust camp and wrote brilliantly about his ability to come back to his faith after tragedy.  I keep a prayer he wrote on my dresser, the essence of the prayer is him requesting  above all else the ability to be able to pray with sincerity. The ability to pray with faith is perhaps the greatest gift of spirituality that God has given me personally and the church as a community. 

  There are definitely reasons to be pessimistic and some of them maybe emotionally and intellectually justified, but none of them change the fact that it is better to be thankful.

  If I learn one thing in my life, I hope it is how to how to have the faith to be sincerely thankful for the grace of God even when I do not understand it.

  Do you find it hard to be thankful in times of hardship? What can we do to be more thankful, even when it's hard?
  

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