Finding Gratitude in Life's Brokenness and Challenges

Paul was writing the church that uh thessalonic in chapter five first Thessalonians and he said uh, Rejoice always, pray without ceasing and then give thanks in everything, for this is God's will for you, and the idea is not give thanks for all circumstances but give thanks in all circumstances because circumstances may not be God's will for you but that you be a grateful person, that's what God wants for you and me. [00:01:10]

Elie Wiesel the great writer, survivor of the Holocaust humanitarian wrote no one is as capable of gratitude as the one who has emerged from the kingdom of the night, and the kingdom of the night of course is that place of human suffering and Brokenness and confusion of Darkness, the place where it seems God is Not, the place where Jesus himself cried out my God my God why have you forsaken me, and everybody will spend some time in the Kingdom of the night. [00:01:44]

And so our gratitude is not frothy or sentimental it doesn't assume that circumstances will work out the way that we want them to we find God hanging on a cross even in the Kingdom of the night, so a few thoughts as we get ready for cultivating gratitude in thinking about the difficult and the hard and the bad because gratitude if it means anything at all has to be deeply compatible with them. [00:03:13]

He said we can only accept the pain in our lives if we discover our true self beneath all the masks and realize that if we are broken we are also more beautiful than we ever dared to expect, when we realize our Brokenness we do not have to fall into depression, seeing our own Brokenness and beauty allows us to recognize hidden under the Brokenness and self-centeredness of others, their beauty their value their sacredness. [00:04:08]

John Hall, who in the grip of a disease descended into blindness, and uh he writes for some time his aversion to it and the suffering that it caused him, but then he writes about a spiritual experience he had while listening to music in a church an encounter with God, the thought kept coming back to me he writes, could there be a strange way in which blindness is a dark paradoxical gift, does it offer a way of life a purification. [00:05:07]

I was filled with a profound sense of worship I felt that I was in the very presence of God, that The Giver of the gift had drawn near me to inspect his handiwork if I hardly dared approached him he hardly dared to approach me he had as it were thrown his cloak of Darkness around me from a distance but had now drawn near to seek a kind of reassurance for me that everything was all right. [00:06:00]

And I have found one of the deepest experiences of gratitude going through this journey of the Gratitude challenge to come, not when I think about how good my life is but when I think precisely about God's presence right in the midst of pain that I cannot make go away, and I think that has something to do with the heart of God for a world where the pain and the beauty and the gift and the Brokenness are somehow so intermingled. [00:06:50]

One strategy for cultivating gratitude is remember the bad, in our society very often we work really really hard to forget the bad but then we are diminished in our Humanity, think of your worst moments, your sorrows, your losses, your sadness, and then remember, focus on how you got through the worst day of your life, the trauma, the trial, you endured the temptation, you survived the bad relationship. [00:08:06]

Sometimes even when bad things happen they can ultimately have positive consequences things that we cannot be grateful for so choose an experience from your life that was initially unpleasant unwanted try now to focus on the positive aspects or Consequences of this difficult experience, as the result of this event what kinds of things do you now feel thankful or grateful for, has it benefited you as a person how have you grown. [00:08:51]

None of this diminishes the pain or makes the world or me any less broken but it infuses them with meaning, because somehow it's in the broken places that I find God, it is at the cross, in the Kingdom of the night, where we meet him, and we discover the darkness cannot extinguish the light the lightest come in the world and the Darkness cannot put it out, so we thank him today in all circumstances. [00:10:05]

Even that in the Brokenness in the bad circumstances God is working for good, it is true, it is still true in the Kingdom of the night, like that little crow is calling out, we have so much to be grateful for. [00:10:45]