When life gets hard, can you find something to be grateful for?
Here in the United States, it’s the week of Thanksgiving, if you’re listening/reading this when this episode comes out. It’s a time to stop and remember all the blessings in your life and to thank God, even when life gets hard.
If you’re listening at another time of the year, or in a country that doesn’t have a specific holiday or national day of thanksgiving, please keep listening/reading. Gratitude is not just for a seasonal holiday or for one country. Being grateful is important every day of the year for every nation and individual on earth.
When life gets hard, it seems there’s not much to be grateful for
But there are a lot of people who are struggling these days and don’t see much to be grateful for. They’re having a hard time paying their bills. There are health challenges. They’ve lost a loved one or one of their kids has estranged themselves from the family. They’re trying to get out of an abusive relationship. Or they’re all alone. The list goes on and on.
And sometimes these challenges come one after another and pile up quicker than you could have imagined.
If you’re struggling in any of these situations right now, or if you know someone who is, Thanksgiving can be a challenging holiday. When it seems everyone else has a loving family and friends, enough money to have a decent life, and good health but you don’t, it can be hard to find something to be grateful for.
Gratitude is powerful when life gets hard
But finding something, lots of somethings, to be grateful for is a powerful medicine for the heart and your whole life, especially when life gets hard, and the challenges keep pouring down like a waterfall.
If you’re in a season of struggle right now, your life is full of challenges, and you have no idea when things are going to get better, you’re probably thinking: Hey James, there’s just nothing going on in my life right now to be grateful for.
I get it. There have been times in my life when problems just seemed to crash down on me one after another. There have been times when I didn’t think I had anything to be grateful for.
The very first time this happened I was in 8th grade. For months my parents had been struggling to keep their business from failing. They were gone a lot working and were pretty stressed out. The level of tension in our home increased every day.
Then on Christmas Eve, it happened. My dad got a phone call. He listened silently. It was the worst thing I could imagine. The loan company took over my parents’ business because they were so far behind in paying their bills and had thousands of dollars in debt.
We lost almost everything
It was a moment of great despair. My mom and dad had worked so hard to make the business a success and now it was all gone. Not only that, my had dad owned a lot of real estate and some land in the country where we had hoped to build a home.
But we lost it all. The loan company took everything but our home and my parents’ cars.
During the weeks that led up to that terrible news, I was so absorbed my parents’ worry that I did no t see anything to be grateful for.
But the most amazing thing happened after my dad got off the phone and learned his business was gone. Instead of being sad, instead of tears, we all breathed a sigh of relief. It was almost like a terrible nightmare was over.
The next day was Christmas. There was hardly anything under the Christmas tree. We just didn’t have money for presents. I think that hit my parents harder than losing their business.
We had lots of things to be grateful for after all
But it was actually one of the happiest Christmases I’ve ever had. The greatest gift was that I had my parents back. They had been working so hard, we hardly ever saw them. Suddenly I had so much to be grateful for, even though we didn’t have any money and we had no idea how things would work out.
All that next week we spent being grateful for all that we did have, our home, each other, friends and extended family, our church, and our faith. And we prayed a lot.
Then the most beautiful thing happened. My dad was offered a job teaching at a nearby university if he would go back to school and finish his PhD, which he had started 20 years before. Everything fell in place and that’s exactly what happened.
When I look back on that whole situation, I can see clearly how being grateful, even in the midst of all those challenges, was one of the things that got us through it all.
As I said, it may seem counterintuitive to be grateful when life gets hard and everything is going wrong, but that’s when gratitude is most powerful. It allows you to see the good you do have, even if it may seem small. The more you focus on the good you have and are grateful, the more you open yourself up to receive more good.
When life gets hard, Jesus shows the way
As always, Jesus sets the standard for how to live every aspect of our lives. And finding something to be grateful for when things don’t go they way you think they should is no exception to Jesus leading the way for us.
At one point in his ministry Jesus had been preaching and teaching in several cities and there were too many healings and miracles to count. But the people there did not repent and did not believe in Jesus. Listen to how Jesus responded.
Then Jesus began to denounce the towns where he had done so many of his miracles, because they hadn’t repented of their sins and turned to God. “What sorrow awaits you, Korazin and Bethsaida! For if the miracles I did in you had been done in wicked Tyre and Sidon, their people would have repented of their sins long ago, clothing themselves in burlap and throwing ashes on their heads to show their remorse. I tell you, Tyre and Sidon will be better off on judgment day than you. And you people of Capernaum, will you be honored in heaven? No, you will go down to the place of the dead. For if the miracles I did for you had been done in wicked Sodom, it would still be here today. I tell you, even Sodom will be better off on judgment day than you.” Matthew 11:20-24 NLT
Tell us how you really feel, Jesus.
Can’t you hear the frustration and the utter disappointment in his heart?
The mental shift to gratitude
The amazing thing here is that as Jesus is processing what has happened, his words take a shift and suddenly he’s praying.
At that time Jesus prayed this prayer: “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike. Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way!” Matthew 11:25, 26 NLT
Look at the shift that took place. Jesus was focusing on how things didn’t go the way he had hoped, and then it turned into gratitude.
When you share your faith and people reject you and your faith, does that fill you with gratitude? Does it compel you to thank God for being rejected?
As I said, Jesus sets the example here for us to be grateful even when things go the way we want them to.
Jesus is actually practicing what he had preached earlier in his ministry and proving that his words have value and power, when we put them into practice. This is from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. It’s the last one of the Beatitudes.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Matthew 5:11, 12 NIV
When life gets hard there’s a blessing for you from God
Let’s take the spirit of this Beatitude and apply to what’s going on in your life today.
Whenever you’re facing a challenge, when you’re struggling day after day just to survive, and it doesn’t seem like there’s help coming from any direction, it may not look like it on the surface, but Jesus is promising you that you are blessed. God’s blessing is upon you. And that is something to be grateful for.
You may not see the blessing right at this moment, but it is there. At least, that’s what Jesus is saying. He had to put this gratitude in the face of challenges into practice first and show us it’s possible if he expects us to follow his example.
And this wasn’t the only time he thanked God when things seemed hopeless.
Being grateful when you don’t see any hope
Remember when Jesus was standing outside the tomb where Lazarus was buried? He had come because Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, had called him to come and heal their brother. But Jesus got there four days after he had been buried.
To all outward appearances Jesus was too late. All hope that Jesus would heal Lazarus had been buried in the tomb with him. At least that’s what everyone but Jesus thought.
Jesus saw something different. It seems clear to me from reading this whole story, which is in Chapter 11 of John, that Jesus knew he was going to call Lazarus back to life.
When Jesus asked the people standing nearby to roll away the stone from the grave, Martha thought he was out of his mind. But that did not stop him.
So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.” John 11:41-44 NIV
Thank God in advance
Everyone else present was mourning and saw nothing at all to be grateful for. Jesus began his prayer with gratitude, the simple gratitude that God was hearing his prayer. And what a difference that made.
Are you standing at the tomb where you’ve buried your hopes for the future? Have you been rejected by people you have worked hard to bless? Are you drowning in struggles and challenges of life?
Then it’s the perfect time to follow Jesus’s example and be grateful.
I know, it may seem impossible to find something to be grateful for when there are so many problems. But there is always something to you can express gratitude for.
It can start with something incredibly simple and basic like having air to breathe.
And here again, this may sound counterintuitive, but you can actually be grateful for the challenge itself. Not so much for where it finds you, but that it causes you to turn to God for help.
Gratitude brings healing
I had a friend at church years ago who told me about a serious health challenge she was facing. She had prayed about it. She had gone to various health professionals and tried everything she could think of to find a solution. But nothing helped.
Then one day as she was asking God what to do next, the answer came in a flash. She told me she quit praying to solve the problem and just started thanking God for whatever lesson it was that He wanted to teach her, even though she didn’t know what it was yet.
It dawned her this was mostly an opportunity to know God better and feel His loving presence more than she ever had before. Her heart overflowed with gratitude before, during, and after each step of this process.
The longstanding problem, severe asthma attacks she’d had since childhood, dissolved and never troubled her again.
Gratitude is a powerful healing prayer. It turns us in the right direction. It opens our ears to hear God’s voice. It opens our eyes so we see God’s blessings. It opens our hearts so we feel God’s presence.
When life gets hard, be grateful for everything you can think of
When life gets hard, when things don’t go the way you’d hoped, when challenges pile up and it seems like there’s nothing to be grateful for, that’s the very best time to thank God for everything you can think of.
Thank God for everything you do have, even the smallest and seemingly insignificant things, like a light switch or a door knob, a knife and fork, all those things we usually take for granted. Pour out gratitude for them. I mean, just think what a light switch and a door knob can do. That is totally something to be grateful for.
Thank God for the challenges. Thank God for people rejecting you. Thank God for the blessings and solutions that haven’t come yet but will.
Thank God for the ideas and inspiration He sends you, the smile of a stranger, the late afternoon sun shining on the sides of trees.
And as hard as it may be, find ways to be grateful when something good happens to someone else. When someone else gets the promotion or the job you applied for, be grateful for them.
Be grateful for all good everywhere you see it
Be grateful for anything and everything good wherever you see it, whoever has it. There’s not a limited supply of God’s love and goodness. There’s an abundance for everyone. When you open your eyes with gratitude for everyone else’s good, it prepares you to receive more of that good in your own life.
When life gets hard and stays hard, keep pouring in gratitude. No problem can withstand or outlast your gratitude.
But gratitude cannot be just something you choose to express at a given time in a particular situation. True gratitude is a mindset, a way of living and thinking. It’s a lens to look at the world through.
If you always looked at the world through, let’s say, a piece of blue glass, everything would always look blue. Now, what if you looked at the world, everyone in it, and your own life through the lens of gratitude?
Even when life is hard, you would see so much to be grateful for. You wouldn’t have to work hard at being grateful, any more than you’d have to struggle to see everything blue if you were looking at things through a piece of blue glass. It would simply be what you saw because you were looking through that lens.
Gratitude come from inside you
Gratitude doesn’t come because of what happens to us, whether it’s good or bad. Gratitude comes because of what’s inside you. Don’t just look at your life or the world trying to find things to be grateful for. You may or may not be successful.
Don’t start with circumstances outside yourself looking for something to be grateful for. Gratitude doesn’t come because of circumstances. Gratitude comes first. Find the spirit of gratitude first in your heart, then you can see any circumstance in the light of gratitude.
I love this passage from Psalms
Hear, O LORD, and have mercy upon me: LORD, be thou my helper.
Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;
To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever. Psalm 30:10-12 KJV
When life gets hard, it’s actually an opportunity, it’s a call, to embrace the spirit of gratitude. Every day is an opportunity to know and love God more, to love your neighbor and yourself more as children of God, and to be blessing to others. And that is a lot to be grateful for.
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James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and church mentor. He conducts Bible workshops online and in person. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by learning to think, pray, and love like Jesus. Contact him here.
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Bible References
Matthew 11:20-24 NLT
20 Then Jesus began to denounce the towns where he had done so many of his miracles, because they hadn’t repented of their sins and turned to God.
21 “What sorrow awaits you, Korazin and Bethsaida! For if the miracles I did in you had been done in wicked Tyre and Sidon, their people would have repented of their sins long ago, clothing themselves in burlap and throwing ashes on their heads to show their remorse.
22 I tell you, Tyre and Sidon will be better off on judgment day than you.
23 “And you people of Capernaum, will you be honored in heaven? No, you will go down to the place of the dead. For if the miracles I did for you had been done in wicked Sodom, it would still be here today.
24 I tell you, even Sodom will be better off on judgment day than you.”
Matthew 11:25, 26 NLT
25 At that time Jesus prayed this prayer: “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike.
26 Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way!
Matthew 5:11, 12 NIV
11 Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
John 11:41-44 NIV
41 So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me.
42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”
43 When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”
Psalm 30:10-12 KJV
10 Hear, O LORD, and have mercy upon me: LORD, be thou my helper.
11 Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;
12 To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.
