Back in the pioneer days, oranges were a rare treat.  I remember reading in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories how they would be overjoyed if they got a single orange in their stocking for Christmas.  It was hard for me to imagine what that was like.  In my lifetime, oranges have been only a grocery store away.  Every week I buy a bag of big juicy navel oranges and eat them most days with my breakfast.

But I have never enjoyed them as much as I have in the last month.  They may be commonly available in our day and age, but that doesn’t make them any less of a treat.  For me, they have become a daily reminder of the power of gratitude. 

I know that gratitude is a topic that most of us have heard taught on, preached on, expounded on, lectured on, or any other kind of verbal spouting you can imagine – probably more times than we can count.   And, at the end of the day, it’s probably not a bad thing.  It’s an incredibly important topic that we have a tendency to forget, especially when we are hurting. 

But there are a couple of angles to gratitude that may not be explored quite so often and that is what I want to talk about here.   I think that they are directly related to our emotional grounding. 

The first is that it causes us to recognize value.   Looking at the world through grateful eyes causes us to see value around us.  Why am I grateful for the orange?  Because I appreciate its intrinsic value.  It tastes good.  It’s refreshing.  It’s healthy.  Why am I grateful for the flowers that are coming up in my garden?  I value their beauty.  Why am I grateful for the car I drive around town?  Because I value its functionality, and yes, its speed and good looks too. Why am I grateful for the people I love? Too many reasons to count. When we practice being grateful – when we look around and say, “What am I grateful for, or what can I be grateful for?” we are practicing the art of finding value.  THAT is a powerful tool in our emotional grounding. 

In the last blog, I explored the process of finding purpose in powerlessness as a way to prevent feelings of futility.  This is another facet of the same idea.  When we are tried by all that is going wrong, we can find some emotional stability in the discovery of value.  It is most effective when we can find it in the situation itself – such as the purpose of the trial.  But we have to learn how to think that way first.  Those pathways in our brain need to exist before we get to the situation that will try them.  Otherwise, we will be far more inclined to focus on the pain, the wrong, the hurt.  How can you build those pathways in advance?  One way is through gratitude.  Find and appreciate the value in life around you every day, all the time.   Then, when the hard times come, you will have an onramp to finding the value that God has wrapped in the package of pain. 

Another facet of gratitude is that it reminds us of the transitory nature of our lives.  I know.  How does THAT help with emotional grounding?  Words like “transitory”, “temporary”, “fleeting”, are not particularly helpful when we are already feeling unstable.  But in reality, to strengthen ourselves, we need to disrupt our human tendency to depend on life’s continuity.  We have to find our anchor in the nature of God alone – His continuity is the only thing that is truly dependable.  The disturbance of things we never considered disturbable can cause us the most turmoil. 

On New Year’s Day, 2020, did anyone imagine that by March, all kids would be doing school from home for the rest of the school year?  Or that nearly every dine-in restaurant in America would be closed?  Or huge festivals and sporting events shut down?  I doubt it!  These are things that click by without us giving them a second thought. 

Gratitude reminds us in a thousand small ways that it is not a guarantee that we will have access to the things we value forever.   It builds in us, in the context of appreciation of the gifts of God, a durability against changes in our world.  The shock of violent change is mitigated by the regular, conscious choice to recognize the uncertainty of life.    

I am grateful for the orange I am eating today because I see value in it and maybe, I won’t get to eat an orange tomorrow.  I’d like to, but who knows if tomorrow will be what I expect it to be.  So, thank you, God, for my orange today.

Let me tell you, this is not a practice that I particularly enjoy.  As a Mercy, I want stability.  My hard wiring is to create an ecosystem and DRIVE IT INTO THE BEDROCK, thank you very much.  Gratitude as an act of worship and appreciation of the value around me, yes, definitely.  Gratitude as a reminder of the uncertainty of life, not so much.  But I think it is an important exercise.  I think that we practice a dangerous game of brinkmanship by allowing ourselves to mindlessly expect things to be a certain way all the time.  Those are pathways that are being built too.  That’s a way of thinking and directing our emotions, even if we don’t realize it.  And those pathways aren’t going to help you or me very much when the world turns upside down. 

But if we practice remembering that we really don’t know what might change in a moment’s notice …   

Anything could change. 

Except the nature of God. 

Thank you, Lord, for the orange I ate today, for I don’t know if I will have one tomorrow.