Dear Friend,
A few years back, I was driving through a construction zone on the highway, doing everything you’re supposed to do—hands steady, eyes up, speed down for the barrels. Somewhere in that narrowed stretch of concrete hallways, it didn’t matter how carefully I was driving. I became the middle car in a multi-car pileup, hurt badly enough that an ambulance carried me to the nearest hospital, where I stayed several days before I was well enough to go home. It would be months before the full damage from that crash caught up with me, but it did, and it eventually led to a second back surgery.
A reader sent me a note through the Suggest a Letter link and asked me to write about gratitude. He thinks too few people really understand what it is. I’d add, how do you actually give thanks when nothing in your circumstances seems to warrant it (because I think a lot of us have been there)? These are all fair questions, and honest ones, so I want to give them honest answers instead of greeting-card ones.
Here’s where I want to speak carefully because I don’t want to be unclear. I was not thankful for that pileup. I wasn’t thankful for the pain, the days spent in the hospital, or the second back surgery that followed months later. Nobody in their right mind thanks God for a construction-zone collision, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed they did. But was I thankful in the middle of it? Absolutely. One hundred percent. Thankful to have survived a harrowing experience. Thankful for a wife who came to my side and refused to leave. Thankful for surgeons skilled enough to maintain an already damaged back. Thankful for a church family who covered us in prayer while we sorted out what came next. None of that made the accident good. All of it let me see God’s hand while I was living through something bad.
I’ve come to believe that’s close to a capsule of what it means to live in this world at all. It would be easy to expect something like karma from God—or from the universe, if that’s more your language—the sense that good gets good, bad gets bad, and whatever lands on you is simply a fair trade for something you put out first. Karma repays like for like. It has no other setting. That is not what happened to me on that highway, and it is not what has happened to me since I trusted Christ. In Him, I have not received like for like. I have received the exact opposite of what I earned: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ did not even the score between us. He took what I owed and handed me what He deserved instead—my sin traded for His righteousness, my debt closed out on His account. That is not karma balancing a ledger. That is grace, and grace does not keep books the way karma does.
That distinction—thankful for versus thankful in—comes straight from Paul, writing to a church that was getting battered from every direction. He didn’t tell them to feel thankful. He told them something sturdier: “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Read that verse slowly and notice the preposition doing the heavy lifting. He didn’t write, “give thanks for all circumstances.” He wrote “in.” Thanksgiving offered in the middle of the wreckage, not for the wreckage itself.
Gratitude as a feeling and gratitude as a practice are two entirely different animals, and most of us have only ever met the first one. The feeling shows up on its own schedule—after good news, during a sunset, when someone says the right thing at the right moment. You don’t summon it. It arrives, or it doesn’t. And if that’s the only kind of gratitude you know, you’re at the mercy of your circumstances every day, because feelings follow circumstances the way a shadow follows a body.
David understood this better than most of us, and he wrote it while running from a king who wanted him dead: “I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1). At all times. Not just the good ones. David wasn’t hiding from an irritating coworker in that cave—he was hiding from an army and a king thirsty for blood. And he still put praise on his lips, on purpose, because he’d learned that genuine praise doesn’t wait to be released by one’s circumstances.
He wasn’t finished. Later in that same psalm, still hiding in the same cave, still under the same threat of death, David wrote, “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8). Notice what hadn’t changed by verse 8. He wasn’t rescued yet. The king was still hunting him. The cave was still a cave. And from right there, unrescued, David called God good—not “God will be good once I’m out of here,” but good, present tense, in the middle of the very danger he hadn’t escaped. That’s the whole lesson, really. God’s goodness was never meant to be measured by the size or shape of our circumstances. It’s measured by who He is, and who He is doesn’t change based on where we’re hiding.
I think this is where a lot of us get gratitude backward. We treat it like a barometer—something that measures how good our life currently is—when Scripture treats it like a muscle. A barometer only tells you what’s already true outside. A muscle, worked on purpose, changes what’s true on the inside. Every time you name something to be thankful for when you don’t feel like it, you’re not lying to yourself or performing for God. You’re training the same instinct David was describing, the one that eventually gets strong enough to hold weight even when the feelings haven’t shown up yet.
I’m not going to tell you the feeling never came, back in that hospital bed. It did, in time, and in a thousand smaller moments since. But it came after the choosing, not before it, and most days it still does. Some mornings I wake up with an ache in a place that back surgery was supposed to fix, and gratitude is the last thing my body wants to hand me. I say thank you anyway. Out loud, sometimes, to a dark room, because James was right that faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and I’ve come to believe thanksgiving without practice dies the same way.
Paul had his own reason for writing what he did to the Thessalonians, and it wasn’t cheerfulness for its own sake. He’d already told them a few verses earlier to “rejoice always, pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-17)—three commands stacked together, none of them dependent on how the day was going, all of them describable as habits rather than moods. That’s good news for people like me, and I suspect, people like you. You don’t need a happy day to obey Paul’s instructions. You just need a decision, repeated until it becomes a reflex.
So to the reader who asked the question: I don’t have a formula that removes the hard circumstances, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed to. What I have is smaller and sturdier than a formula. Every day, sometimes every hour, name one true thing you’re grateful for, whether or not it feels like anything at all. Say it out loud if you can. Do it in the hospital bed, in the empty house, in the diagnosis you didn’t ask for. Not because the circumstance deserves thanks, but because the God who’s still with you in it does, and He hasn’t changed, whatever the day has done.
That’s the whole secret, if you can call something this simple a secret. Thankfulness was never meant to be a mood we wait around for. It’s a discipline we choose, because His goodness was never the kind that depends on our circumstances to stay true.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth
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Before you leave the fire, I invite you to sit with these three questions:
1. Is my gratitude currently a feeling I’m waiting for, or a practice I’m choosing?
2. What is one true thing, however small, I can thank God for today—not because the day earned it, but because He is worth it?
3. Who in my life needs to hear me say thank you out loud, even if the circumstances around us haven’t changed?
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Amen Pastor Neal. Without gratitude there’s no recognition of God’s presence outside of what we think is a result of our doing.
Thank you, Neal, for your wisdom. Although I make a practice to think of at least 3 things I'm grateful for at the end of each day, this challenged me to practice gratitude more in the middle of stuff. Especially the hard stuff. I always appreciate the things you have to share.