I can’t stop thinking about what a woman tells me over dinner last week:
“I can’t explain how it’s changed my life, Ann: Only when I keep counting gifts, do I learn how to keep counting it all joy.”
I set my glass of water down on the table like she’s just dropped her mic.
This is God-Math: Unless you’re counting your gifts and gratitudes, you don’t know how to count it all joy in your trials.
This is God Math:
Unless you’re counting your gifts and gratitudes, you don’t know how to count it all joy in your trials.
Headlines talk of attacks and wars and AI domination, you can feel it, like we are all on some edge of shifting, tectonic change, and who knows how things will unfold? Someone I love painfully struggles to recover from a devastating stroke. Someone I love doesn’t call anymore and silence can slice the deepest. Someone I love is in the midst of a crisis and their whole world just detonated and how do you love well when things seem anything but well?
I just confess: Trials have this way of making your mental math all wrong, because trials twist how, and what, your mind all counts.
When you’re under stress, your brain starts doing only Stress-Arithmetic. Stress-Math says this painful season equals a permanent sentence; says what is hard now equals what will always be.
I nod slowly and that’s what I want to tell my friend across the table who’s quietly pouring dressing in this neat circle over her caesar salad:
Stress-Math has this tendency to make your hardships greater than your worship.
“Yeah, I mean, all the trials, all the time — and instead of doing God-Math and counting gifts, so that I can count it all joy…. I can actually end up doing this: Stress-Math that subtracts the strengths, supports, and solace you still have, so you count the crisis more than all kinds of capacities.”
Because sure: Survival focus can be helpful, but it also can create this Stress-Math that tends to subtract your world down to feeling like it’s only what’s hard.
Stress-Math has this tendency to make your hardships greater than your worship.
I’ve been there and, honestly, it’s really hard not to stay there:
Trials can turn out the light — so you feel like life is just all dark rooms.
And yet, isn’t greater reality that:
Doing the God Math of counting gifts doesn’t once deny that dark rooms are real; doxology just dares to open the doors, to more good possibility that’s beyond the doors.
When in the dark, doxology dares to open the door to the light of more.
“When in the dark, doxology dares to open the door to the light of more. “
Maybe, when I look back and look around, this is the math that always keeps mathing: Trials often equal despair. And counting gifts and gratitude defiantly multiples hope.
So, I’m this fool in upending days who leans into the Upside-Down Kingdom of God (because what is believing other than really leaning in and leaning the whole of your life on the counter-culture ways of God?) — and I dare to still keep looking for the light of the Kingdom of God, and then write down the glimmers of light and grace there in each square of the Joy Dare Calendar, and that’s what ended up running like a refrain through my days all last week:
Unless you’re counting your gifts and gratitudes, you don’t know how to count it all joy in your trials.
Can I find 3 lovely gift today that I overheard? A gift old, new, blue? A gift from something I’m reading, seeing, making? Dare to look for gifts that bring joy and you dare the dark to confess that there is still defiant, resilient light.
A toddler’s crinkled nose and giddy giggle… our daughter quietly playing Ode to Joy on the piano… the sheep baaaaaing for me as I open the back door…
“When we give thanks for goodness in the world —we’re likely to literally become more of the goodness in the world. “
And even in the swirl of things, as I dare to trying to keep opening the doors of the dark rooms of my life and looking for the light, I can testify: Everything changes when we look for one good thing — because that good thing is always a God thing.
And that’s how the equation of everything starts to change in the most unexpected ways, and I can’t get over how strange God Math works in the world:
When we give thanks for goodness in the world — we’re likely to literally become more of the goodness in the world.
It’s no small things to realize: Research indicates that giving thanks can increase real giving, helping behavior—even when that giving kindness isn’t easy — and studies show that expressing gratefulness makes people more likely to give great kindnesses again.
In other words, giving thanks doesn’t only change how we feel; it can change how we act.
“If we really want a society that’s a joy to live in, now is the time for every single one of us to radically practice intentional acts of kindness to bring joy to just one other person every single day — which changes society. “
It’s brought me up short and I can’t shake it these days as I dare to keep this daily practice of gratitude: Daring to look for good to give thanks for isn’t some merely optional nicety, it’s an absolutely critical necessity.
Because:
Thankfulness doesn’t just make you feel good — it actually moves you to do good.
Giving thanks doesn’t just make us feel more joy, it literally makes us more giving and kind, which imparts more joy to the world….
Daring to count gifts … moves you to actually become more of a kind gift, which is to say: a daily practice of gratitude grows to become a practice of daily kindness — and isn’t that exactly what the world direly needs more of right now?
The emotion of thankfulness for good and grace and gifts in the world, is precisely what puts us in motion to actually be a gift of more good and grace in the world. Isn’t that the invitation we all need to say yes to right about now?
And in the midst of a cold January spell of snow and wind and storm after storm, I find myself making these little treat boxes that hold a candle, a tea bag, several wrapped cookies, and a typed out prayer to slip in a pocket… and surprising others with this intentional act of kindness.
And it doesn’t seem like much, and it doesn’t at all seem like enough, but THIS IS THE THING:
If we really want a society that’s a joy to live in, now is the time for every single one of us to radically practice intentional acts of kindness to bring joy to just one other person every single day — which changes society.
If we want a society that brings joy — how is every single one of us being a gift of kindness who brings joy to someone today?
When we daily dare to live into this long sleuth and hunt for the good — we actually become more of the good this whole world’s longing for.
Counting the gifts of grace.. and actually becoming a gift of grace… it’s our small and simple daily work — but isn’t it culture-making and ushering in more of the Kingdom of God?
Hum an old hymn.
Smile and tell a cashier I loved her glasses.
Make a phone call and slay loneliness for both of us.
“The way you count it all joy in your trials, is to keep counting your gifts and gratitudes everyday.“
Bring a friend a tea.. .the gift of a warm winter pause.
Paused and paid attention with thanks to the way snowflakes falling soundlessly out on the spruce.
It’s in the first days of a new year and I find it anchoring, steadying, enlarging, to keep working the God-Math:
The way you count it all joy in your trials, is to keep counting your gifts and gratitudes everyday.
Because counting gifts and gratitudes is how we learn the miracle of God-Math— how joy can multiply even in the minus signs of tender, hard days.
And then that grateful joy moves us to become the gift, to give kindness forward daily —- which begins to change the calculus of everything… love and hope raised to the power of God.
