Joyful Thanks

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers, welcome and thank you for joining us here. As you can tell from the title, this week has been, in a unique way for us, one characterized by “joyful thanks.” I’m sure the warmer weather, sunny days, and the trees bursting with newly budded leaves played a critical role, but still there was something more…

From feeling joy and thankfulness for day-to-day life opportunities we never thought we would be able to enjoy again, to jointly expressed appreciation for our home and neighborhood, the blessings of our church family, Joy’s expanding network of knitting/crocheting friends and role with Bundles of Love… All combined with the enjoyment of family and lifelong friendships and a uniquely felt sense of God’s grace and mercy throughout.

There were no big events, no big answers to prayer, no healing of Joy’s TBI. The associated aphasia, cognitive challenges, and sight problems continued to plague her, and at times beat her down pretty bad emotionally, yet when I told her what I thought I’d focus on for the blog this week, she wholeheartedly concurred.

We both had sensed these small but significant and frequent bright spots of joy, of gratitude, and of profound thankfulness. So all in all, on a rather mundane week, we were truly blessed. I often share Henri Nouwen's insights and once again appreciate his take on joy as related to our experience when he writes:

Joy is essential to the spiritual life. Whatever we may think of or say about God, when we are not joyful, our thoughts and words cannot bear fruit. Jesus reveals to us God’s love so that his joy may become ours and that our joy may become complete. Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing—sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death—can take that love away.

Joy is not the same as happiness. We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there because it comes from the knowledge of God’s love for us…. Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us.

But joy is only part of the equation. Not long ago, I quoted from Brené Brown’s research correlating joy and gratitude and much of this past week certainly affirmed and validated her findings. However, I also appreciate these further thoughts from Nouwen which speak so well to our experience even though they were written years before Brown “proved” it with her research. 😊 Again he writes:

Gratitude…goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline.

The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint….

The choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious…. There is an Estonian proverb that says: “Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.” Acts of gratitude make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.

And so in closing we'd like to invite you to join us in this practice of gratitude and as an encouragement, we'll leave you with a passage from our Bible reading this week that sums things up rather well...

Let all that I am praise the LORD;

with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name.

Let all that I am praise the LORD;

may I never forget the good things he does for me.

He forgives all my sins

and heals all my diseases.

He redeems me from death

and crowns me with love and tender mercies.

He fills my life with good things.

My youth is renewed like the eagle’s! Ps 103:1-5