Last month, we celebrated a national holiday specifically
set aside for being grateful. That fourth Thursday in November is eagerly
anticipated as a time when good food, family, football, and a sense of our
nation’s history all come together. Many of us have wonderful memories of
Thanksgiving Days of the past, and we look forward to the ones to come. Even if
we have to spend half our time cooking, it’s easy to be grateful on such a
happy, fun day. After all, that’s what we’re supposed to do that day –
be thankful to our Creator for our blessings.
But what about the other 364 days of the
year? Do we need to feel grateful on those days, too? The obvious answer
is “yes.” Do we succeed in having a thankful attitude, maintaining it in our
hearts and making it apparent to others? And are we teaching our children to
be appreciative of “every good and perfect gift” that they have been given by
God (James 1:17)? There are plenty
of passages in the Bible that instruct us to be thankful (e.g., Psalm 100:4;
Colossians 3:15), yet we know that we fail in this many times – instead of
gratitude, we display impatience or bitter disappointment when things aren’t as
we think they should be.
Luke tells the story of the ten lepers whom Jesus healed on
His way to Jerusalem (17:11-19). Of the ten, only one – a Samaritan
– came back to thank Jesus for ridding him of the deadly disease of leprosy.
Jesus asked, “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there
not any found who returned to give glory to God except this foreigner?” Jesus
must have been dismayed that the Jewish men among the group were not more
appreciative of the great gift of renewed life they had been given. We see that
lack of gratitude is not a problem that is unique to our culture, our society,
or our time. And it can often stem from materialism: from desiring to have too
much than is necessary for us to have.
The life of the average American is one of relative luxury
when compared with the lives of most of the people of the world. I was not
wholly aware of this until I spent some years living in Eastern
Europe in the mid-1990s. Before leaving the US
to begin teaching English in Dimitrovgrad,
Bulgaria, I spent a few
weeks getting organized for the transition. In my imagination, I was already
there, living in a picturesque little village with lots of flowers and cows.
When I arrived in my new home, it was dark. But in the morning
– and in the days, weeks, and months to follow -- I was shocked to see just how
drastically wrong my preconceived ideas had been.
My apartment house had broken-out windows. My bathroom was
crawling with roaches, and the kitchen tap sometimes ran with black water. My
telephone was connected to a gaping hole in the wall by a single exposed wire.
Homeless cats and dogs roamed the streets, and people rummaged with long sticks
through the dumpster outside my window. At a medical clinic, my blood was once
drawn through a tube with a human mouth sucking at the other end of it. People canned fruit, beat rugs, and killed chickens outside, along
the sidewalks. The school “library” consisted of a few books stacked
beside the secretary’s desk, and the tiny copy machine – locked away on the top
floor of the derelict building we shared with another school – appeared to be
for emergency use only. The white substance I used on the cracked chalkboards
crumbled in my hands when I tried to post lesson material, and the tattered communist-era
paperback textbooks that I was supposed to teach from contained anti-American
literature. The electricity both at school and at my apartment was constantly being
turned off, making it impossible at times to conduct class (sometimes we had
class at night) or grade papers and make lesson plans at home.
There were Christians meeting in the capital city of Sofia,
led by American evangelist Joe Rose. He and his wife, Juline,
kindly invited me to spend the night with them when I came into the city on the
weekends for worship services. I so well remember that first Friday when I
headed to the train station to travel to Sofia.
The tiny ticket window, behind which sat a surly clerk, was absolutely mobbed
with Roma (often called “gypsies”), and I decided I’d better press forward with
the rest of the crowd or risk not getting a ticket.
Out on the platform, a similar scenario unfolded when the
train pulled in, with more people than the train should have been carrying
cramming themselves into each car. Again, I decided I’d better hop to it, or I
wouldn’t be going to Sofia that
day. I found a spot beside the door to one of the cars, and I stood or crouched
there for about two hours until we reached the city of Plovdiv, where most of the gypsies
got off. Although more than ten years have passed, I recall that train ride
clearly, because during much of it I was wondering if I could possibly get out
of the teaching contract that I had signed. How soon could I go home and get
away from here?
I completed my first year of teaching and returned home for
a couple of months off during the summer, and I found that my eyes had changed.
My heart had changed. During that one school year, I had learned infinitely more
than I would have been able to teach in twenty years’ time. Because of
political events beyond their control, college-educated, professional Bulgarian
men and women were making $50 per month and could not afford some of the basic
necessities of life. Most of my students’ parents were factory workers, and
they were out of work altogether, with both their present and future looking
very grim indeed. Inflation was out of control – I remember taking a bus ride
to nearby Haskovo one afternoon, and by the time I
was ready to return to my city a couple of hours later, the price had risen
twenty leva or so. Do we think life becomes more
complicated for us when our gas prices rise quickly? Yes, it does, but try making it when the prices of everything from bread to
electricity rise so high, so quickly, that you cannot possibly keep up. This
was the plight of many Bulgarians in the 1990s.
During my two years in Bulgaria,
I was met with constant problems and frustrations. Yet, I knew that at the end
of my time there, I was coming home to the United
States, a stable, wealthy country. I made it
through hardships because I knew they were only temporary. I am grateful for
the experience because it taught me gratitude the way nothing else could have.
I also learned that I can make do and be happy with less. I am trying to pass
those lessons on to my children, young though they are. Part of our
responsibility as Christian parents is steering our children away from materialism
and toward humble appreciation for what we do have.
Our sons and daughters may not understand how incredibly blessed
they are to be living in the United States.
They may not understand how grateful they should be for the everyday luxuries
that they take for granted – things like central heating, cars, drinkable
water, and iPods. They may deliberately ignore or
make light of the role God plays every day in providing to them the things they
need to stay alive. How many times have we seen a stage show, movie, or
television program during which a character offers a sarcastic “prayer” of
thanks to God, while claiming the credit for doing all of the work needed to
get the things he’s supposedly thankful for? We must teach our children better
than that. They need to understand that God is due our constant, sincere
gratitude (Ephesians 5:20; Hebrews 13:15).
Just as we designate one day a year as the official time for
“thanksgiving,” we can fall into the trap of just being thankful to God on the
first day of the week, when we assemble with other Christians to worship Him.
How can we make being thankful a permanent, ingrained part of our children’s
character, and not just something we mention in a prayer once or twice a day? A
starting place could be outlawing excessive complaining, whining, and criticizing
in our homes. Within reason, we should have little tolerance for those things
from our children, and from ourselves (Colossians 4:6; Proverbs 10:19-21, 15:28).
My seven-year-old daughter and I have been reading Pollyanna
(by Eleanor H. Porter) together at night before she goes to bed. The story
concerns an eleven-year-old orphan who goes to live with her Aunt Polly, a
stern woman who disapproves of the happy, high-spirited child. Pollyanna overcomes
the heartaches and disappointments in her life by playing the “just being glad
game.” She takes the problems and inequities she encounters and turns them
around by finding something in them to be glad or thankful about. It became a
game that she played without even thinking about it, amazing the people around
her with her positive, optimistic attitude. Reading
and discussing this story has provided my daughter and me with some valuable points
for discussion and, I hope, some ideas for getting rid of the whining and
complaining that had begun cropping up in our household.
Not too many of us have the opportunity to live or travel
abroad. We can’t all see for ourselves just how grateful we should be for what
we have at home. Those who have gotten off the tour buses in places like India
and Africa could tell their own stories of the
deprivation experienced by so many. But the Word of God speaks to us from cover
to cover with the message of how important it is to give thanks, and we don’t
have to travel anywhere to hear that message. We just have to open our Bibles,
read what God has told us and done for us, and – like the one man out of ten
who had been healed of leprosy – remember to give heartfelt thanks to “the Rock of our
salvation” every single day of the year (Psalm 95:1).
