Full Disclosure as Entrée to Expressing Gratitude

In my last blog I promised to talk about the powerful double-edged benefits of expressing gratitude.  First, however I have a “full disclosure” confession, so that you might know my understandings about this topic before I launch into a discussion on the immense power of thanks-giving as mentioned so frequently in the Bible.  Three things:

First we humans are, by nature, social.  Myths from our culture about individualism are simply not true.   Yes, there is just one skeleton inside my skin.  That is pretty obvious but it is also deceiving, because a part of me is my brain, and in the mind of my brain live thousands of other people.  For that highly-populated me the most important people include my family, friends, and acquaintances, and my God.  Consciously and non-consciously those people from the past, present, and anticipated future, and God, continuously influence who I am and what I do and think.

Second who we are is, in a general way, also what we notice.   And what we notice tends to be what is meaningful to us now and what gets our attention.  Guides who help us notice what to be thankful for along our journeys are central to our mind’s storehouse of what is meaningful.  For example, parents and schoolteachers are among our primary guides for what to notice during the first 20 years of our life, as have been our pastors for our entire life.  But so too can parishioners at your church be your guides -- if you notice them and truly listen to them.  Those parishioners who have had cancer, those who have gone through divorce, the single mothers, the family members whose brother, or daughter, or husband have a mental illness, alcoholism, developmental disability, or serious illness or accident – they can be your guides.  They can share stories of the “whole picture” and help you notice the upsides as well as acknowledge the negatives of that journey – and walk with you on your journey along similar pathways.

Third, humans have a huge and critically important capacity for beliefs.  The things that are the most meaningful and important to us in life tend to be in one way or another our (today’s) beliefs;  for instance -- that our spouse will love us forever, that that other car will stay on his side of the road, that our God will always be there, or that the medical community will help cure me of my illness.  These un-provable beliefs then become a major influence enabling us to move through our world with relative confidence that all is well.   Incidentally, our beliefs generally support our expectations of a basic predictability of daily life. [Of course, broken beliefs can be a major cause of our despair.]

There is a fourth issue, but I struggle so with it myself that I hesitate to call it a “full disclosure”.  I grew up in a culture that strongly encouraged independence and a striving for “sizeable” personal accomplishments.  It took 10 years of reading research studies to finally come to grips with the undeniable fact that we humans are really social creatures.   But I still struggle with thinking that it is the “big” events, the marvelous trips, the major accomplishments that make life worth living.  Yet I now see accumulating evidence that it is the frequency of the small positive emotions over the course of a day that make a difference for our sense of well-being: the feelings of contentment from a purring cat in one’s lap, the joy of laughter with a family member, the gift of the sight of a loved one in the morning, the sharing of a compliment with a clerk in the grocery store, the prayers sent up on behalf of the family of a friend who is very ill, the receiving or giving of a “thank you”, the taste of delicious food, the excitement of an email asking for help with an important church activity, the lift from hearing about a success of a child or grandchild, the comfort of a good telephone conversation with a friend.  These and a hundred more positive events of daily life are all colorful balloons in the blue sky of our well-being.

Bruce