Lack of thanks in my life is most often connected to discontentment. I have realized through the years that my discontent is a refusal to live by faith that God rules my life with wisdom, goodness, and love and that I must contentedly receive whatever comes to me from his hand as trustworthy and right. But swelling ingratitude within me wishes for another life, another result, another provision, another circumstance instead of the one he has brokered for me. Rather than receiving that which comes down from the Father of lights as a good and perfect gift, I scorn the Father in my thanklessness.
If we outwardly notate our thanks for isolated things while in the inmost places of our heart continue to oppose what God is doing in our lives, we are not living with true gratitude to the one who is sovereignly and lovingly orchestrating our story.
When we let this ingratitude overtake us, it consumes us and keeps us from living life to the full. My favorite Wendell Berry novel is Hannah Coulter, an elderly woman’s tale of her life, love, and losses. As she notes at the beginning of the novel, “This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed…. This is my story, my giving of thanks.”
She wisely reflects, “The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can’t make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives…but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks. I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
Indeed, those are the right instructions as given from Paul’s words to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5.16-18). God’s will for us in Christ Jesus is a life of deep joy, continual prayer and abiding thanks. Interestingly, the words which follow those right instructions in verses 16-18, “Do not quench the Spirit,” reveal that a life of discontent, independence and ingratitude is like pouring buckets of ice water on the enflaming work of God’s Spirit in our lives! These instructions from Paul as Hannah Coulter reminds us are of utmost importance.
As we approach a season of thanksgiving, let us press contentment deeply into our lives. It seems to me that contentment rooted in trust of God’s sovereign storytelling in our lives is the deepest form of thanksgiving. If we outwardly notate our thanks for isolated things while in the inmost places of our heart continue to oppose what God is doing in our lives, we are not living with true gratitude to the one who is sovereignly and lovingly orchestrating our story.
My seminary professor, Dr. Jim Coffield, would often gently and tearfully repeat this guiding statement in his pastoral counseling classes: “Christian maturity is beginning to love the story that God is telling with your life.” Spiritual maturity is measured by grateful contentment that is fueled by faith in God’s benevolent rule of our lives.
As we practice giving thanks, let us continue to express thanks for the routine created things. But may we also take gratitude even deeper as we give thanks for the larger canvas of our life that God is painting. Then we may be marked as people who are no longer wishing for another life but as those who gladly live and truly love the life that God has given us.