Health & Healing Ministry

As we again enter this month of Thanksgiving celebration, I would like to share a few thoughts on the power and role of gratitude related to our health and wellbeing. The dictionary defines gratitude as "the state of being grateful, thankfulness." "To be thankful is to be "conscious of the benefit received." Robert A. Emmons defines gratitude as a "felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life." He notes that fifty years ago, Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, recognized the capacity to "appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others" was a central part of what he called self actualization. Often, we have many things in life to make us happy, but lack the conscious awareness to appreciate it. As Sarah Ban Breathnach notes in her book, Simple Abundance, "we spend our days thirsting after happiness when we're really standing knee deep in the river of abundance." She encourages us to open our eyes and give another look; and believes that as we focus on abundance rather than lack, we will have increasing feelings of contentment and fulfillment.

As you begin to prepare for your Thanksgiving dinner and celebration, take time to reflect back on that first Thanksgiving. Consider what those Pilgrims had been through... If you had seen half of your friends die; suffered through famine, malnutrition, and sickness; endured a year of tragedy and heartbreak – would you have been thankful? Most of us probably would not. Gratitude isn’t an emotion most of us spend time cultivating. But perhaps we would think differently if we realized its extraordinary power to change our lives. These days, many of us tend to see gratitude as a polite social skill or warm feeling; but research has determined that gratitude can be much more. It can be a basic disposition, and seems to make people happier, healthier, more fulfilled, and even live longer. Dennis Prager, author of "Happiness Is a Serious Problem", writes "and it is gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy."
This is a thoughtful observation, and may help explain why the Christian faith places such importance on thanking God. The Bible is filled with expressions of gratitude. What could be the reason? God needs our gratitude? I doubt it. But maybe we do. Learning to be thankful helps us to take less for granted. And the less you take for granted, the more pleasure and joy you will find in life. If you never give a thought to all the positives in your life, like good health, a warm home, food on your table, caring family and friends, etc.; and assume that all the good things in your life are "normal"and to be expected, you diminish the happiness they can bring you. In contrast, if you train yourself to count your blessings and be grateful for them, and even reflect on how much worse things could be, you will fill your life with gladness. It isn't easy and takes practice; but can open the door to a fuller and abundant life.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby had an interesting thought. He suggests that, in a sense, gratitude is an expression of modesty. The word for gratitude in Hebrew is hoda'ah - the same word for confession. "To offer thanks, then, is to confess dependence, to acknowledge that others have the power to benefit you, to admit that your life is better because of their efforts."

As we enter this season of thanksgiving and Advent, preparing ourselves to celebrate God's greatest gift of all, I encourage you to make time to practice thankfulness. Don't take all the gifts in your life for granted. Remember we can't live abundantly without God or each other. Even in difficult times, the good in our lives usually outweighs the bad. Look for all those ordinary and forgotten gifts God has provided you on a regular basis. Give thanks. You will be amazed at the abundance in your life, and be happier and healthier because of it!

Peace, joy, and gratitude to each of you for all you add to my life,

Bonnie