The Spiritual Practice of Giving ThanksLisa Borden - 23 Dec 2009
When you think about it, saying "Thank you," is one of the first manners we encourage small children to adopt. This simple practice of remembering to thank the people around us is so basic to positive human interactions that, when absent, it is a glaring rudeness that paints the withholding party as arrogant.
Somewhere along the line, then, we've learned that gratitude for services rendered or a job well done is an appropriate and meaningful human to human response in life.
But what about thankfulness as a spiritual practice and a way of life?
In Psalm 50, the poet is speaking for God when he says--
"I don't need bulls from your farms or goats from your herds. All the animals in the forest are mine and the cattle on thousands of hills. All the wild birds are mine and all living things in the land... Let the GIVING OF THANKS be your sacrifice to God..."
Thanksgiving as a sacrifice... What a thought.
But actually, as I pondered it, I realized there have been plenty of times in my life when the spiritual practice of giving thanks functioned as a sacrifice. Let's consider being evacuated from home when bandits were too close, too bold and too many. Then there were days of trauma when a teammate was sexually assaulted and our team gathered in guest houses in the capital to work through how to deal with the issue over the vast cultural divides between U.S. nationals, Kenyan officials and Maasai elders. Those were crummy times and I won't bore any of us with a litany of more of the same.
On those nights, as we huddled in safe places away from home, I found that I could only muster wee prayers that said things like, "Thank you for this pillow tonight."
And feeble as it was, my thanksgiving was a sacrifice and, as such, it pleased the heart of God.
Some days, thanks is a discipline that doesn't feel like one. It's an overflow of gratitude that wells up naturally. Other days it's a rendering, a beating down of the grief or struggle to bring out what is good. And there's something about the costliness of the practice on those days that makes it, for lack of a better word, sweet.
But, whether it be an overflow of easy thanks, or a wrestling to not go under, giving thanks is always a blessing.
I'm pretty certain every country should set aside a day to practice it :-)
Lisa has spent the last 34 years nurturing new Christians, first among Kenyan students, then among the Maasai of East Africa’s wilderness, before six years among young people in Europe. Back in Africa, her passion remains the development of simple, authentic faith in lives around her. She has been part of the 24-7 Prayer family for over 16 years.