After reading, Ann Voskamp’s book, 1000 Gifts about cultivating a spirit of gratitude, I decided to print off her prompts and try it myself. I used an enormous amount of ink to print them in color. Then I cut them into their designated squares and tucked them inside the perfect journal. I found the practice surprisingly easy. The prompts were creative and simple. Each day we were to write down three gifts (Ann’s term for things to be thankful for) such as 3 gifts red, 3 gifts eaten, 3 gifts hidden. When I would missed a few days in a row, I wrote 12 gifts instead, still enjoying the simplicity of the practice.
Then every once in awhile the prompt would be: 3 hard gifts. These took more thought, especially at a time before I really knew what hard was. Sure, I’ve had bad jobs I hated and we were struggling financially at the time but I was still able to muster up some gratitude. Even in the wake of my sister’s passing, I could be thankful that she wasn’t in pain anymore and the certainty I would see her again someday. Death is the finality of our human ailments, releasing us fully into the Good. For someone who faced constant pain and suffering, death can be a welcome relief. I believed it was for her. If anything is a hard gift, this would be it. Yet my young naivety had me believing this was the worse of it and it would all be uphill from there, but there were plenty more hard thanks up ahead.
It’s been six years since I did that simple practice of giving thanks, counting my blessings, gifts or whatever you like to call them. I never continued the practice. I simply marked it off as a spiritual achievement and moved on. Yet simultaneously, I had stepped onto a difficult path of my own suffering with grief, faith deconstruction, and a loss of purpose. My own literal interpretation of scripture began to crumble into metaphor and mystery, and I was baffled by the God I though I knew. My understanding of scripture at the time was squeaky clean with certainties that brought me immense comfort. Even with all my theological training, it’s hard to break free of a culture of interpretation that takes the Bible very literally. I began to have my own Job-argument with God. As the path to suffering stretched out, I became increasingly more angry. The familiar messages of Job’s-friends spun around my mind and I wrestled with the beliefs that I A) didn’t have enough faith or B) needed to confess some unforeseen sin. But none of that was true, I was just in pain. All that I knew of God and faith up to that point was up for questioning. And much like Job, when the answers didn’t come, all that was left was mystery. How can one be thankful for that?! It is an impossible gift to be thankful for and yet, it is a gift nonetheless.
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