How Gratefulness Right Now Can Snuff out Fear & Fuel Hopefulness

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and gratefulness fuels hopefulness.

Giving thanks gives reassurance and gratefulness fuels hopefulness.

I write that epiphany down on a sticky note and stick it by the sink. Because it’s easy to forget the whole of your story, that there’s more to the story …

It’s easy for one hurting and very real part of your story to steal the headline of your life and hijack your tender heart.

It’s easy to think that the painful lines in your story mean there are no joyful lifelines in your story.

No pain gets to be the loudest part of your story, and no brokenness gets to claim your whole story and steal all your joy: There is heartache and there is still holy joy.

I hugged a woman this past weekend who drove her daughter home from chemotherapy treatments each week while they counted gifts and gratitudes out loud. As she told me, I couldn’t help but hug her tighter. Grace embraces you and doesn’t let go. Her tears fell honestly. Her brave smile still testified gloriously.

No pain gets to be the loudest part of your story, and no brokenness gets to claim your whole story and steal all your joy: There is heartache and there is still holy joy.

There is loss – and there is still love.

A woman who survived a category 4 Hurricane reaches out to grab my hand in a community that went 17 days without power, where people were looking for water and fuel and real help to pick up the twisted wreckage of their lives, and she tells me how she sat down with a piece of paper and a pen in the midst of everything, in spite of everything. Her husband asked her what in the world she was writing down.

“Gifts. So I can remember.”

She was still writing when she got to the 7th page of paper.

The grace story of God out writes every other story in the world.

And I nodded: “There are so many other things Jesus did. If they were all written down, each of them, one by one, I can’t imagine a world big enough to hold such a library of books” (John 21:25). The grace story of God out writes every other story in the world.

All kinds of hardships may be coming for all of us – and we have to have a way to remember that grace hasn’t ever, and never will, stop coming for us.

I sit at my old, worn desk that used to a blacksmith’s bench, and I reach for that Gifts and Gratitude journal to remember grace upon grace, gift upon gift, that I might see how God is forging a good story out all these days.

No matter what unknown the days ahead may hold.

When we thank God ahead of time — we get ahead of the fear.

When we thank God ahead of time — we get ahead of the fear.

The human brain either feeds off fear, or it lives on love — those are the only two sources of sustenance for our cerebral matter.

And fear and love are connected in unexpected ways: Fear happens when we love so fiercely that we grip tightly, panicked that we might lose what we love.

But real love opens hands and lives surrendered and giving, so that the love can grow even larger.

Open your hands to receive each day, each moment, as a love-gift from God, write down a few of your gifts and gratitudes each day, and what you’re doing is counting all the ways God loves you – and you’re fueling your brain on the love of God.

Whatever fuels you — is what you become. Count the ways God loves you, gift upon gift, and you’re fuelling your brain with the love of God, and you’re becoming love.

Or keep giving space to the fear — and you become what is feared, and you grow all the fear larger.

Come a new month, come November, and I keep coming to the pages of my Gifts and Gratitude journal because this is always the choice that keeps coming: Doxology or dark.

And I keep choosing gratitude because: Doxology is always the wi nning strategy.

Gratefulness always dissipates fearfulness.

It’s an exhale to savour these simple things that are amazing grace, that are sacred things — divine love gifts:

Warm fall light and sitting in grass, steaming coffee warming hands, the sound of a pen scrawling across paper, the fragrance of fall candles, the mail lady’s smile, waving to a neighbor, laughing in unexpected moments in the middle of the day…

It comes like real relief:

Gratefulness always dissipates fearfulness.

And daily thankfulness gives you eyes to really see: You’ve already lived so many days that you said would make you joyful.

And daily thankfulness gives you eyes to really see: You’ve already lived so many days that you said would make you joyful.

This stops me hard.

When I look back there on today’s page of gifts and gratitudes, to see on that same page, all these gifts of love a good and loving God provided on this day of the month, on all the previous months, not only do you feel hopefulness for enough amazing grace for all the days to come, you realize:

The real fake news is that there isn’t all kinds of really genuine good news.

The Farmer had doctor’s appointments back to back this week. And an ultrasound to try to determine the source of the pain. Shiloh had clinic with her cardiologist to monitor her heart function. I sit with the weeping and grieving — and I weep and grieve. We pray. Sometimes anxiety is palpable and we intimately know the fear of the unknown.

The real fake news is that there isn’t all kinds of genuine good news.

And yet there it is:

When you have this daily way to keep looking for the good, to count Gifts and Gratitudes, so you know you can count on a Good God, you remember the rest of the story, the good still in the story – and how He is re-membering and restoring and re-storying you.

Come the beginning of November, the last of the leaves fall off the trees, this letting go into a grateful surrender, letting go into the hopefulness of the story and the next season coming.