There are two kinds of thankfulness: the easy kind, and the kind that you offer in the midst of a fight.
The easy kind flows when life is peaceful, kids are getting along, your heart feels full, and everything goes as planned. Of course we’re thankful for these things! But the other kind — the battle-cry kind — is forged in the middle of anxiety, sleepless nights, unanswered prayers, and overwhelm. That kind is a sacrifice of thanksgiving. It’s worship…and warfare. As soon as it’s offered, it changes the atmosphere. The longer I walk with Jesus, the more I realize: Gratitude isn’t about being positive. It’s about being postured. It’s not a self-help, fluffy tool. It’s a weapon. It’s obedience. It’s faith…
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There are seasons when our prayers feel like they’re still being written.
This time last year I was a shell of myself. My body had become stuck in fight-or-flight mode. I couldn't sleep at all, could barely eat. It felt like my brain had broken and I had no idea how to get the pieces back together. After a trip to the ER, a psychiatrist appointment, counseling and deliverance sessions, and lots of support from my family and friends, I finally started to slowly exit my way off what I call the “hamster wheel,” the endless cycle of my OCD thinking. My brain had become locked in on sleep, obsessing over it to the point that I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t even really sit down. I was broken and I needed help. I cried out for deliverance. Every night, when my fear became the greatest, I would sit beside the Christmas tree with my Bible and journal. I would whisper and write prayers to God until I fell asleep in that chair. It was the only place I could rest for a while, right there in the arms of Jesus. So, I get it. If you’ve watched the clock tick and the calendar pages turn. You’ve carried longing in your chest like a stone, wondering whether God heard, whether “yes” is coming, or whether you’ll ever see the “yet.” And in that place—right in the middle of the incomplete, the undone, the still-becoming—you can still give thanks. Because gratitude isn’t an offering we present to God when everything’s tidy. Gratitude is a posture of the heart that whispers, “Even if …” 
I don’t know about you, but slowing down doesn’t come naturally to me. My default speed is “go.” Between motherhood, ministry, writing deadlines, and the ever-growing list of to-dos, I’ve often convinced myself that the faster I move, the more faithful I’m being. After all, productivity feels a lot like purpose—until it doesn’t.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that gratitude and hurry can’t coexist. One always chokes the other out… 
There’s a kind of gratitude that never makes it to Instagram.
Not because it isn’t beautiful, but because it’s quiet. Subtle. Hidden in the kind of moments no one claps for — the sock folding, the toddler tears, the seemingly ordinary Tuesday where dinner is chicken nuggets with a box of Annie’s mac and cheese and grace covers what energy can’t. As women, especially in a world that celebrates curated thankfulness — the handwritten pumpkin tags, the thanksgiving tablescapes, the picture perfect holiday family photo — it’s so easy to believe that gratitude is something to be performed rather than practiced. That we show our thankfulness by the way we present our lives, not by the posture we hold in the unseen corners of them. But the most transformative gratitude? |