I invite you to simply pray this prayer today. Pray it throughout the day. In the Psalms, abiding in experiencing, noticing, and delighting in the presence of God is described in myriad ways. Gratitude and thankfulness are clearly keys that unlock the door. (cf, Psalm 100) And, a persistent seeking is highlighted in Psalm 105, “Seek the Lord and His strength; Seek His presence continually!”

Continually is an important word. It suggests persistence and regularity. A day set aside for thanksgiving is a wonderful thing and a persistent seeking of God in gratitude is even better! Jesus encourages us to “seek and you will find.” (Matthew 7:7)

Pray this simple prayer throughout the day and keep praying it, or something like it. In Psalm 130:5, we read these words, “I pray to God, my life a prayer, waiting for what He will say and do.” (MSG) Our “lives a prayer” – what a beautiful image … to have a life shaped by prayer. It is simple and yet infinitely deep.

As you feel comparison or complaint or a desire for certainty arise in you, gently set them to the side and return to this prayer.

My Lord and my God, thank You.
I am grafeful because You are good,
Your love never stops, and You
abide with me every moment.
In Your goodness and by Your
grace, may I abide with You
today. Give me eyes to see You in
each moment and ears to hear
Your quiet voice. Amen.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Gratitude calms our hearts. Gratitude says “I have enough and I am at rest.” When we are rest, we are no longer striving … we are quiet in soul … we are able to see all that is around us without demand. 

When gratitude seems inaccessible, it is usually because we are on the hunt for more … more than we presently have. As we’ve explored in the previous days, this can show up in comparisons. It is usually a part of complaint. And, it can be present in the desire for certainty. We want to know what is going on. We want to know what is going to happen. 

We don’t like doubt or confusion. And … yet, lack of certainty is part of the human condition. While we might not like uncertainty, it is tied to the way God made us in the beginning. In the Garden of Eden, God told the first humans that they had freedom. They could eat the fruit from any tree … except the one called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Genesis 2:16-17) The enemy of God (Genesis 3) approached and suggested that God was holding out on them. He was keeping something from them. They ate, and so started humankind’s quest to grab certainty … to know … to be in control.

The alternative is trust. We were made to live in a trusting relationship with God. The core of our design consists of loving God and saying to Him, “not my will, but Thy will be done.” (Luke 22) Our will is our sense of control and determination. To exercise our will requires having a measure of certainty and knowledge in order to effectively operate in the world. God’s heart for us is that we live in a surrendered kind of way. His desire for us is to release our will and come under His will … His heart, His love, His care. 

As we are able to say “not my will, but Thy will be done,” the doubts and uncertainties do not necessarily evaporate but they do not steer the vehicle any longer. Instead, there is a happy surrender, a gratefulness that we can be at rest. Words like surrender can possess a negative connotation, but for those who have surrendered there is a peacefulness that passes all understanding. The striving, the searching, the noise dissipates. 

In Matthew 11, Jesus invites us to come to Him, to follow Him and His ways … “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

Trying to be certain about everything is not only impossible, it is tiring. There is a way of life and also many ways of religious living that are focused on certainty, but Jesus invites us to trust Him … to follow Him … to watch how He does it. How does He do it? Trust. Surrender. It was Jesus who uttered the words “not my will, by Thy will be done.” It was Jesus who said, “the Son can do nothing of His own accord but only what He sees the Father doing.” What is an “accord?” One’s accord is their will, their sense of what to do, their certainty.

And, the result? A glad surrender … a satisfied, restful trust. It is saying, “I’m not in charge. I don’t know it all and I can rest in my finitude, my limits, my creatureliness.” This does not mean we don’t study or search for wisdom but it means that certainty isn’t my goal. Trust and surrender are the goal.

Do you struggle with a need for certainty? If so, welcome. You are in good company. However, there is more into which we are invited … a life of gratitude that remains after we release certainty as our ambition. And, that gratitude gives us eyes to see the glory of God and His goodness all around. 

What will it look like for you to release certainty today? How will you trustfully embrace not knowing?

Gratitude opens our eyes and gives us sight. With a grateful heart, we see what is rather than what is not. Thanksgiving, as an attitude of the heart, is something that cleans the fogginess that can obscure our vision … our ability to see God in us, around us, and in others. But, gratitude can be hard to come by.

One of the heart postures that can create fog is complaint. When things are hard, we often feel complaint arising in our hearts. We can complain about anything when we’re in a complaining mood. A sunny day can be too hot. A beautiful snowfall can “ruin” our plans for travel. A little deeper, perhaps, is that complaint can become a lens through which we look at life. When things don’t happen the way I want them to happen … when things don’t turn out the way I’d expect … when things aren’t fair or just, complaint can be our “go to.” It can be our interpretive lens.

To be sure, there are things that are hard and painful and fearful and unjust. The challenge is that complaint is an interaction with those hard realities of life that is based on me … my perspective, my expectations, my ideas, and my preferences. To drill a little deeper, complaint is usually centered around the perceived loss of my independence … my ability for self-determination. 

The solution, however, is not denial or dismissal. It is not acting like hurts and losses are not a big deal. It is not necessarily about “thinking positively.” When things are hard, we have an invitation from God into a kind of prayer called lament. Lament is a prayer that cries out to God with all the emotion and pain that one is feeling: God, how long? Will you abandon me forever? (Ps 13) or My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? (Ps 22) or My enemies surround me (Ps 27).

Whereas complaint focus on me and my loss of independence, lament focus on God and our cries of dependence. God, I need you. I am desperate without you. As the people of Israel moved toward the promised land in the Old Testament scriptures, there were told that it was a land flowing with milk and honey (to put it in New Testament terms: an abundant life). What the people of Israel misunderstood is that both milk and honey were items that were provided by God. Milk was dependent on there being rains that gave the goats plenty of grass to eat so that they would produce lots of milk. Honey was something that would be “found” in trees and places where bees were thriving because of a healthy environment. The land of Palestine was/is a land dependent upon the fickle rains that may or may not come. Milk and honey are symbols of dependence. 

As the people of Israel were travelling to this land, they complained about the food God provided each day (the manna). Rather than a grateful heart that came from dependence, they had complaining hearts fueled by entitlement and a sense of what they deserved. A dependent life didn’t feel so good and so they complained. Their complaints were not so much God directed as self-focused. And when complaint was the lens through which they viewed life, they actually told God they wanted to go back into slavery in Egypt because “at least the food tasted better.” (paraphrase from Numbers 11:4-6) Imagine that, thinking that being enslaved was better because the food tasted better. That is what complaint does to us. It colors our perception and spirals our thoughts into darkness.

However, lament, which is invited by God, has a way of transforming us and enlightening our eyes. In Psalm 13, the Psalmist even prays “enlighten my eyes.” It is a prayer of dependence and just a few verses later, it is written, “I have trusted in your steadfast love … I will sing to the Lord.” To be sure, lament is not magic – it doesn’t necessarily offer an instant transformation into seeing sunny skies where clouds are. However, it does transform … sometimes slowly and sometimes more quickly as we take our lives to God in prayer and dependence. 

Lament changes us because it enables a shift from independence to dependence which is another one of our “default settings” as humans. We are dependent beings and when we are living dependently, we live freely and lightly. We experience gratitude and grace, and as thanksgiving is on our lips (even through tears and hard times) we see Him. We experience God. 

What would it be like for you to release complaint today and instead come to God with a prayer of lament? Lament can be gritty and messy but it is invited by God. He doesn’t ask us to deny the hard things or ignore them but to bring them to Him in dependence and surrender. Whereas complaint centers around being independent, lament deepens our dependence as we place our hope in God.

And, the release and freedom we find in lament leaves us thankful.

As we move into thanksgiving week, we may find ourselves not feeling very thankful. It has been quite a year. From the pandemic to racial injustice to job losses to a contentious election, we are likely feeling and experiencing a lot of things and thankfulness is possibly not one of them. We’re tired of hearing the word “unprecedented.” We’re exhausted from relational tension. We’re ready to move on. 

“Let’s hurry and get to 2021.” “Put out the Christmas decorations and maybe 2020 will just give up and leave us alone!” The impulse to move on is strong even when we know the truth is that all of our challenges won’t go away with decorations or the turn of the calendar to another year. Two things I know are true:

1. The present moment is where we experience love, joy, peace, and patience. We can erroneously believe that love will happen in the future or peace will be present when things change. Or, we desire to return to a time in the past where things weren’t so tough and joy seemed to be abundant. The truth is that all of these things (love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness) are the result of paying attention to God now. Jesus encouraged us to abide. To abide is to remain, to stay put. To abide means that we stay where we are … with God. “I am the vine and you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for part from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5, ESV))
2. We can’t dismiss our hurts and frustrations as if they are no big deal. We have to walk through them. In Jeremiah 6:14, we read, “they dress the wounds of my people as though it were not serious, ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (NIV) Richard Rohr has commented, “If you do not transform your pain, you will transmit it.” This is why we may find ourselves overreacting to a situation or looking for something to explain away the pain. How is pain transformed? Foundationally, transformation happens as we refuse to deny or ignore but instead be honest about where we are.

Thanksgiving and gratitude can act as keys that unlock the door of staying in the moment and walking through our wounds and hurts. Psalm 100 encourages us to “enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise … come into His presence with singing.” A grateful heart gives us eyes to see that God is with us and gives us courage to walk through pain. How? When we express gratitude and thanksgiving, we are reminding ourselves that “the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”

When going through difficult seasons, our impulse is often to find relief when what we really want and need is transformation. As we abide, we are transformed. As we look into the face of God, we are changed: “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Thomas Merton wrote, “The gate of heaven is everywhere.” The Apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5 shares: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all things.” The invitation of God is slow down, stop, and abide with Him as you express gratefulness. When you are experiencing a desire for relief, let that be a reminder that what you really desire is God. There is nothing wrong with wanting relief, but staying with that desire can be a lock on the door of experiencing God’s presence now.

So, let gratitude ground you. Let thanksgiving return you to the present moment. For what can we be grateful? Very simply: that God is good and loving and faithful.

“Life is lived right now, in this moment. That’s an important reminder for all of us, because we tend to think, “If just this would happen, then I would be happy.” When we put a condition on our lives, we miss out on the present moment because we’re waiting for something else to happen.” Br. David Vryhof

Over the next three days, we will look at some of things that can keep us from gratitude: comparison, complaint, and certainty. Today, take a few moments and decide that you will stay where you are … with God. And then, as a desire to get away rises up, simply return to presence … presence to God in gratitude.

Here is a simple way to return to abiding with God … use three words: now, here, this. “Now” – be grounded in the present time (rejoice always). “Here” – be grounded in your present location (pray without ceasing). “This” – be grounded in the present circumstance (give thanks in all circumstances).