An attribute of gratefulness is that it can’t be practiced alone, not to its full extent. By its nature, it is a reciprocal activity. There is (a) an acknowledgment that we’ve received something outside of ourselves, and (b) a fulfillment of gratefulness by its outward expression to whom we are grateful.
Here’s an example. As my friends know, I don’t cook. Sure, I know some survival cooking skills (boiled eggs, pasta…), but my husband has done 99% of the cooking for our family for the past 26 years. I can practice gratefulness by not taking this for granted – though after 26 years, there is admittedly a temptation to believe it is simply how things have always and should continue to work – and appreciating my husband and this gift he has faithfully offered.
Gratefulness is fulfilled when I express to him my appreciation, which I attempt to do at every meal. There are plenty of examples in a marriage of one person carrying out chores and kindnesses for the other and when the beneficiary appreciates and expresses that, it creates a generative culture. It is marriage-building!
This translates to relationships outside of marriage of course. Gratefulness is a community-building activity.
But it is also important to remember the foundations on which true gratefulness is built – the grace of God. Those who know the blessed relief of being saved – and to be lavished with his love shown through his goodness to us – are marked by and grow in gratitude.
As the Apostle Paul says, “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15). This is the amazement and joy that undergirds all our thanks. (My dinner, my husband, my family, this life… are all evidence of God’s goodness.) And we do this in community as the body of Christ to whom we belong.
And if we thank God for community, we might be inclined to thank God only for those we have an affinity for or positive experiences in our faith. But if our prayers of thanks are truly rooted in God’s unmerited favour to us, then we would, surprisingly, find ourselves grateful for those who light the flame of anger, frustration, envy, defensiveness, or criticism in us (I may have some examples for this from marriage also). Why? Because they’ve reminded us, that we are connected in our sinfulness and shortcomings and, praise God, we are, all of us, the recipients of his forgiveness!
Let us give thanks – together!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about the “Divine Reality of Community” in his book, Life Together:
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful receipients. We thank God for what he has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers [and sisters], who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communual life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of Jesus Christ?
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If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
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In Everything 