How to Cultivate a Grateful Heart (episode 41)

0:00 Right now, as you listen to When You Love a Prodigal, you will discover how to give thanks, no matter what happens. If you love a prodigal, you can find help and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal, but also hope and help for your own life journey. Today, as we talk about growing a grateful heart, choose one of the helpful practices that I'm going to share with you to do today or tonight. Write me and tell me about your choice and how it's gone as you start trying to apply it. Once long ago, when I was young and single, living far from my family, it was Thanksgiving, and all my friends had gone to visit their own family for Thanksgiving. No one that I knew had invited me over, and I didn't have the courage to just invite myself. So as I was kind of working up a big pity party, I remembered that I had a major creative project due after the holiday, one I had not made much progress on. So instead of whining about what I couldn't do, I thanked God for the time to write and asked Him to give me an idea, an approach, and all the words to put it together. So that's what I did over the whole holiday

1:36 weekend, and I think it might have been one of the best things I'd ever written. And maybe that was a real starting point on my long, slow journey to grow a grateful heart. Marriage and parenting added growth with happy times to be thankful and plenty of challenging opportunities. And then our son that got sent to us put that journey in overdrive. In the long 15 years of wilderness with him, there were so many hard times. Days and nights, scary choices, dangerous activities that I had many opportunities to practice giving thanks to our God. And so I can really credit our son, who was the hardest thing in my life, probably has one of the most significant contributions because his choices cause me to learn to give thanks all the time. And here we are, approaching Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S. Canada just had one, others have them. It's a time that people around the world want to say thank you. Most of us will gather with family and friends, eat way too much, and give a nod to giving thanks. Is it possible though to be truly grateful on this

3:10 day set aside to give thanks? And what about the rest of the year? Can we walk through life with a grateful heart? I have found that practice makes a difference. I need to be intentional. I need to work at learning to give thanks. So consider these actions I'm going to share with you that can help grow a heart that gives thanks. And remember, choose which one you're going to apply first. I want to know about it. First, write. That is, write the names of people or places or blessings in your life right now that you can say thank you, Lord, for. Just writing it down. You have a journal, write it in a journal. Today, I am especially grateful for my daughters, Debbie and Michelle. They left their homes, husbands, and children and came to Florida to help restore some order to our home. 20 months of living and working in our home and rarely going anywhere had created quite a mess. In fact, my husband had taken over our entire Florida room where we would normally have guests, which I would like to do again. And so they came and they wrote a letter and so they came and they worked almost nonstop sorting, throwing, organizing, arranging,

4:43 and ended up with three rooms in beautiful order, including an awesome home office for their dad, for my sweet husband, so that he's no longer taking up our Florida room. And I hope he's happy. But I'm very thankful. That's quite a sacrifice that my daughters, it was their idea to come and do it and they work so hard and I'm so grateful. And here I am, I wrote it down so I could tell you that story. Writing down the things I'm grateful for helps me make them more concrete and helps me remember them. So write it down. Remember. So you write it, then you remember how God has rescued or changed you. Think back on the hard situations that have made you stronger. Think of things that you rejoiced about and the gratitude flowed, but then there are the times that you cried.

5:44 And yet there is evidence that God has been with you every step of the way. Since stories are such an essential part of writing and speaking and now podcasting, all of which I do, I practice this all the time. Stories are my currency, so to speak. So I remember the fun ones, the special ones, the special ones, and the hard ones. And I love to just let them run in my mind and remember what God has done. Like the time that my prodigal and his friend somehow went off the road in a neighborhood nearby and landed on top of an electrical box which started a fire in the car. Both boys were knocked out, but I am so grateful that our son came to, tumbled out of the car, stumbled around the driver's seat, and pulled his friend out. I saw the car later. It was like cinder. It was entirely burned up. We can write and remember the things that God has done, and they help us remember to be grateful and express that gratitude to God, to a person who's done something.

7:05 I sent a thank you note to my daughter's husbands, thanking them for taking care of the kids and everything at home for the three days that their wives were gone, because they played a part in what they were able to do. Giving thanks to the people that should be thanked and always to God. Write it down. Remember. Read. Hear something. There are books that can help you grow a grateful heart. There are a lot of how-to books, and some of them are about learning to be thankful. Scripture, the Word of God, is full of examples of people thanking God, reminders to be thankful, even commands to give thanks in everything. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament emphasize the importance of thanking God. Once I did a study on giving thanks in Scripture, beginning with 1 Thessalonians 5 18, which says, in all things, give thanks.

8:11 You could do that. You could look up thanks in the Bible and search why people were giving thanks. Or check out Psalm 145-9. You could write that down, too. And that will give you some reasons to give thanks to God. Then, after read, is reflect. Reflect on the fact that God is God, and God is good. Does that help you say thank you, Lord, in even the most painful situations? He's God. He's in control. Things have not caught him by surprise. But he's not just in control. He's also good, and he's doing good for us. The busyness of life, the bombardment of messages from our culture, the challenges of the choices of one we love, all distract us from the awareness of our God, who is active in every detail of our lives. As it says in the song Waymaker, I love this phrase, even when I don't see it, you're working. Even when I don't feel it, you're working. You never stop. You never stop working. You never stop. You never stop working.

9:32 No matter what's going on in your life or my life, God is there, and he is working. He is bringing about his good, his care for us. He is making things that are going to need to happen for the future ready. He's working always, even if we can't see it, even if we feel lost, even if the pain is unbearable. God's there. He loves us, and he's working to do good to us. And that gives me a grateful heart. A heart of gratefulness stays aware of God in the beautiful events and joys and in the difficult circumstances and experiences. This kind of gratitude pays attention to what he is doing, what he is saying, how he is working. So growing a grateful heart, we can write things, we can remember, we can read, we can reflect, and then we repeat.

10:35 It's kind of like, you know, wash and rinse and repeat. Read and write it down and remember and keep doing it. The most important way to cultivate a grateful heart is to practice being grateful, expressing gratitude over and over. In every situation, we express it. In our family, we have been intentional about learning to say thank you for the good and for what doesn't seem good to us. Here are some examples from my family. My husband, Steve, not long ago, he was faced with a number of significant challenges in our ministry, any of which could cause significant problems for the organization. If all of them took a wrong turn at the same time, the consequences could be severe. His response, thank you, Lord, that you are in control and I can trust you with this. So here's a little one. A couple of days ago, someone, I won't say who, left water running in our bathroom sink where a lot of my stuff was on the counter because we'd been reorganizing things. But there was some semblance of order. The water spread all across the counter and cleaning it up left my things in total disarray. My first response was rather negative, but soon I was able to practice a grateful attitude and say thank you, Lord.

12:17 Our daughter, Debbie, several years ago, her husband, Nick, was diagnosed with a serious liver condition. It almost killed him and remains an unknown threat, though he has been fine since then. There's a little miracle involved there. We learned to be grateful to God. Both Debbie and Nick have said the situation changed our hearts, softened us, and made us aware of our complete dependence on God. It is a daily reminder to us to say thank you. Our daughter, Michelle, has never been a fan of running. She hasn't really liked athletic things and really active stuff.

13:01 So she wasn't thrilled when her husband, Brad, took up serious running. But she joined him just to be with him and engage in what was important to him. And now, she says, it has become something I am thankful for to benefit me personally as well as the whole family. And then Josh, in his younger life, our son was not a grateful person, but God has done some beautiful work in him. For a number of years, he worked landscaping. Once, while he was trimming a large hedge, his chainsaw hit the metal fence behind the hedge, and it kicked back and hit Josh on the head, forehead mainly, but... And pretty much knocked him down. The first thing he did was pull out his phone and call 911. And then he said, I said, thank you, God. He recovered, no damage, except he has a Harry Potter-like scar on his forehead. And now it's your turn. How can you practice growing a grateful heart? Write it down, something that you're grateful for. Remember things from the past, good ones that you loved that you can be grateful for, and maybe some hard ones that you've seen good come from it, and you can be grateful. Read God's word. Let God remind

14:34 you of his goodness, that he's God, and he's good, and he loves you. And you can reflect then on all that he's done for you, because you're where you are, because of all that God has done for you. And then do it again. Repeat. Make it a habit, a practice, so that your heart grows. You think, well, that's just mechanical. Well, to get started, it is a little bit, but it's our repeatedly giving thanks in every situation that causes our heart to begin to really believe that God is God, he's in control, and that he loves us, and he's doing good for us, even when we can't see it, to know that he is always working. And that is why we have a grateful heart, as it grows and grows in its ability to stop and say, thank you, Lord. Little things, bigger things, terribly hard things.

15:37 Thank you, Lord, to the words I speak all the time. And again, I would love to hear from you. There's a little thing in the show notes that says, write to Judy. So I'd love it if you'd write and tell me, what did you choose? What is something that you're going to do to let your heart become more grateful? God bless you.