Tender Heart, Thankful Heat

Happiness and joy are not the same thing, you know that, you’ve heard that a million times, but I’m going to make the case that thankfulness and joy just might be.  For Christmas this year, one of my best friends made me a gratitude journal and encouraged me to really focus on all I’m thankful for in 2015. It’s been amazing y’all!  Actively practicing a language of thanksgiving is transformative. At the very least, thanksgiving is the soil in which joy grows.

That being said, I’m going to be really honest here. It’s pretty easy for me to give thanks for the small things.  Like when the weather’s beautiful, or after something great happens at work, or when I get to spend time with the people I love—I’m pretty quick to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving for those types of things. But Valentine ’s Day was this past weekend and I discovered that giving thanks for the season of life I’m in at the moment, when I’m not particularly thrilled to be here (to put it lightly), was not something I was willing or able to do.

When we’re disappointed, when we’ve been hurt or left out or let down, we often are NOT feeling thankful for our present/current circumstances. When we’re hurting and in pain it’s hard to be thankful, even though we are called to give thanks in all circumstances.

It seems unfair that God should ask us to be thankful when our hearts are breaking. Forcing a smile when all you want to do is cry feels hypocritical and wrong. But this “fake it till you make it” mentality isn’t what God’s about.  Read the Psalms, read Lamentations, or any of the prophets for that matter. God invites us to tell him it like it is, with all the ugly, raw, bitter, emotion we can muster. We’ve bought into this lie that as believers, we aren’t supposed to feel anything other than “happy”. Consequently, we exert an insane amount of time and energy manufacturing a superficial façade out of shallow “happiness” to hide our pain, when in reality, life in Christ wakes us up to feel things more deeply than ever before. The world hardens and numbs our hearts so that it takes more and more to move us toward compassion or anger.  Dulled and unfeeling, our hearts are no longer filled with compassion and fail to spur us into action to ease the suffering of our neighbors. 

I can’t even begin to fathom the tenderness of the heart of God. God, 100% holy, righteous, and good, is moved by even the smallest plea from the weakest believer.  As we grow closer to the heart of God, we too begin to feel more, not less.

So when life sucks, when we feel the bitter burn of rejection, when our eyes and hearts are opened to see the suffering in our world, and it hurts so much you can hardly bear it,  it’s a sign that we are in fact coming to life. That the work God began in us is continuing to mold and shape us. And that’s what we can give thanks for.  As we give thanks for these things, for who God IS for all he’s done and all he promises to do, slowly but surely we find our hearts moved to a place where we are able to thank him for our present too.