Some seasons make thankfulness feel like a performance. Honest gratitude makes room to name the hurt and still find reasons to give thanks in the middle of it.
By EEW Magazine Online Empowerment Editors
Honest gratitude can hold two truths at once. (Getty Images)
November has a way of turning gratitude into an assignment. Count your blessings. Remember how much worse things could be. A woman can be grateful for her job and still be buried under an unreasonable workload. She can love her family and feel overwhelmed by everything placed on her. When she says so, she often hears correction instead of compassion: At least you have a job. Somebody else has it worse.
The message underneath: naming what is wrong means she doesn’t appreciate what is right. Scripture never forces that choice.
The prophet Habakkuk trusted God through circumstances he could not celebrate. His book opens with a cry: “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” (Habakkuk 1:2). God’s answer made things harder.
He was raising up the Chaldeans, “that bitter and hasty nation” (Habakkuk 1:6), and Habakkuk had to wrestle with how a holy God could use them. By the final chapter, he trembles at the news of the coming invasion (Habakkuk 3:16) and pictures total loss: a fig tree that will not blossom, vines with no fruit, fields that yield no food and stalls with no herd.
Then he writes, “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:18).
EEW founder Dianna Hobbs explores that kind of honest gratitude in her new devotional, Finding Gratitude in the Dark: 28 Days to See God’s Goodness More Clearly, releasing on Kindle Nov. 2, with the paperback to follow. Day Two, “When God Seems Silent,” follows Habakkuk from complaint to praise. The book’s central line: “When you are hanging on by a thread, let gratitude be that thread.”
Dianna Hobbs’ new devotional, Finding Gratitude in the Dark: 28 Days to See God’s Goodness More Clearly, releases on Kindle Nov. 2, with the paperback to follow. Its companion journal, pictured at right, is coming soon. (Photo: EEW Magazine Online)
Everything in Habakkuk’s declaration turns on the word yet. He admits the fields are empty and rejoices in the God of his salvation while his questions remain. His joy rests on who God is, and honest gratitude grows from the same root. Scripture keeps his hard questions as part of the record of his faith.
Gratitude should never be used to dismiss someone’s pain or minimize what they are going through. A woman overwhelmed by the demands of caring for her aging mother asks for help, only to be reminded how fortunate she is to still have her. A grieving woman is urged to count her blessings before she has had time to mourn. In moments like these, well-intentioned encouragement can become a form of spiritual pressure, leaving people feeling guilty for acknowledging their struggles.
Paul wrote, “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). He calls believers to give thanks in every circumstance. A woman can thank God for the friends who carried her through a diagnosis without calling the diagnosis good.
This Thanksgiving, let your gratitude hold two truths at once. I am thankful for my family, and I need more help. I am grateful for how far I have come, and I am still grieving what I lost. On days when getting through is all you can manage, it can be as small as noticing one kindness.
Habakkuk’s yet admits the fields are empty and declares God faithful in the same passage. “The LORD God is my strength,” he wrote (Habakkuk 3:19). You can say the same about the season you are in. Everything may not be fine, and God is still faithful.
