Strands of Faith: Gratitude
/Gratitude: Grace that comes with the loss of that which we once took for granted.
To Take For Granted
An Idiom
1. fail to properly appreciate (someone or something), especially as a result of overfamiliarity.
2. assume that something is true without questioning it.I took having hair on my head for granted until I lost it.
* This blog post is not about hair loss. Well, to be honest, and to give full disclosure, it is somewhat about hair loss; however, if you haven’t lost your hair, and if you hope you never lose your hair, don’t stop reading.
My thesis is: hair loss taught me to not to take anything in life, even the simplest things in life, like the hair on my head, for granted.
Like I said, I took my hair on my head for granted until I lost it.
Then, when I lost most of my hair, I suddenly realized that there was more to this outcropping of protein filament called keratin that sprouted from follicles found in my dermis than just something to wash, dry, and style.
In my case, my hair was my style.
It was also my identity.
I was known by my curls since hair first began to grow on my head as an infant. Everyone commented on my hair from my earliest of days. “Look at her beautiful curls.” My hair became an important factor in how I presented myself to the world.
On rainy days, or in climates with a lot of humidity, I dreaded the lack of control I had over those curly locks that I took for granted. Once, after I had lost my hair, I came across a photo taken in front of a waterfall. I remember being unhappy that day prior to the photo being snapped because my of my unruly hair. On that day, I had no idea that when I would see that photo a few years later I would cry, not over the unruly curls, or even over the loss of hair. I actually cried over the lack of gratitude I had for something I thought was a given in life.
My Strands of Silver - My bio hair and me at Buttermilk Falls in Ithaca, New York, September 2011
I also spent a whole lot of time complaining about my hair until I lost it. In fact, I used to say, “I hate my hair.” more often than I ever expressed gratitude for it. Gratitude for hair was not even on my radar.
In essence, in the process of losing my hair, I learned that my sense of gratitude was largely based on a belief that I was blessed because of all the abundance I had in my life.
It took the stripping away of a basic “given” in life, something I had always had and could not imagine losing, for me to learn a basic truth about gratitude:
gratitude is unquantifiable.
One of the earliest hymn I remember learning in Sunday school as a child had theses words in it.
“ Count your blessings, name them one by one. Count your many blessings, see what God has done.”
There is great benefit in counting blessings. I’m not discounting the counting of blessings, the naming of all for which one should give thanks. Giving thanks does involve naming and counting, but
I am asserting that:
Just as we can’t count the hairs on our head, those things for which we could count as blessings are often easily overlooked. They are taken for granted. They are taken for granted to such a degree that we wouldn’t even think to count them, to name them, to give thanks for them.
A few Sundays ago, in our Sunday school class, we sat with our Bibles open to Habakkuk considering the lessons of that book in the Bible. Imagine if Habakkuk had been taught that the only way to recognize a blessing was by naming it, counting it, speaking words of gratitude for each large and small blessing in life.
Would he have said, “Counting all these blossoms on this fig tree makes me want to give gratitude for the blessing of knowing that soon we will have an abundant crop of figs?”
Do you remember what he said? He said,
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines...yet I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.”
Habakkuk was not taking that fig crop for granted. In fact, we was considering the day when the fig crop might not produce any figs at all. Instead of a crop of figs, he was counting on, rejoicing in, and giving gratitude for the One from whom the figs would either be given or withheld.
Gratitude is a work of grace
Grace teaches us to not live expecting those exterior things in our lives that we take for granted.
Grace teaches us to look on the interior of our lives to a deeper source provision, for identity and sense of well being.
Grace teaches us to find transcendence and beauty beyond that which is temporal in nature.
Gratitude is generative.
Grace gives generative gratitude, gratitude capable of being reproductive.
True generative gratitude enables us to grow, but it not only enables us to grow; it helps us help others grow because grace given gratitude comes from a source outside of ourselves.
I believe there is a mystical transformation when we begin to see life altering loss as a work of grace . This transformation helps us experience gratitude in ways we never would have known before.
I’ve never known how to describe this transformation. I sometimes have said it results in an expansion of the soul. I had nothing to do with the transformation I’ve experienced in how I experience gratitude, it was something that happened within me over time. It was truly a work of grace.
Henry David Thoreau gave us language for what I think is the essence of gratitude - the expansion of the soul which comes from being grateful for more than just the material things of life.
“The soul grows by subtraction, not addition.”
Gratitude: Found in a soul deeply connected to the essence of grace.
Gratitude comes from trusting in the Hand of Providence rather than in all that Providence has provided.
