A Journey to Joy

Series: Choosing Gratitude

Leslie Basham: You can choose to be grateful to God for your spouse, or you can drift into criticism. Here’s Barbara Rainey.

Barbara Rainey: I have realized as a new empty nester, when I don’t have the children to focus on, how easy it is to become even more particular or more picky and to notice those flaws in my husband more than I did when I had the kids around. So my husband gets all of it. If I’m not careful, I can become critical.

Leslie: It’s Friday, October 30, and you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Over the past couple of days, we have been talking with my friend Barbara Rainey about her book Thanksgiving: A Time to Remember. Can you believer we’re coming up on Thanksgiving already, Barbara?

Barbara: It’s hard to believe.

Nancy: We’ve been encouraging listeners to get a hold of that book and to use it in the upcoming Thanksgiving season with their families, to just cultivate a spirit of gratitude, remembering the background, the history of this holiday in our country but wanting also to make thankfulness a way of life.

So welcome back to Revive Our Hearts again today, Barbara.

Barbara: Thanks, Nancy; I’m glad to be back.

Nancy: Several months ago when you found out that I was writing a book on gratitude, you contacted me. You sent an email, and you said, “This is a topic that I am really passionate about.”

Barbara: That’s right.

Nancy: You were kind to say, “If there’s anything I can do to help promote this book, let me know.” And now that book has been birthed. It’s just been off the press now a few weeks, Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy.

So while we are talking about thankfulness over these past couple of days, I thought it would be interesting if we could get together in the studio today and just talk a little more about this subject of gratitude. I know it’s something that means a lot to you and that you’ve really tried to make it a way of life. So we just want to have a conversation.

Barbara: That’d be great.

Nancy: I’m interested in knowing, when you saw that I was writing a book on this topic, what it was that prompted you to say, “This is something that I’m really passionate about.” Is this something you’ve just always had a heart for?

Barbara: Oh, I don’t know that I’ve always had a heart for it. I don’t know that being grateful is natural for me. I don’t know that it’s natural for too many people. But I think, for me, as a result of writing the book on Thanksgiving and seeing the example in the lives of the people who lived in Plymouth and endured much and yet were constantly giving thanks to God, I was inspired by their example. I thought, “If they can be thankful; if they can express thanksgiving when they had nothing, how much more should I be expressing thanksgiving and gratitude when we have so much?”

So that was really the genesis of my interest in the topic of gratitude.

Nancy: You reference how much we have compared to what our forefathers had, and even in many other parts of the world. I just read something recently, I think, that there are a billion plus people in the world who make one dollar a day. In this country, we cannot fathom how the rest of the world lives, and yet—I’ll put myself in this category—we find so much to whine about.

Barbara: Yes.

Nancy: It seems in a sense like the more we have, the less grateful we are.

Barbara: Yes. It is really, really true. I began noticing that when I began raising my children. Their tendency was to complain about what they didn’t have that their brother or sister had, or a friend had, or someone at school had. It became sort of this epidemic in our household, and I didn’t like it. I knew we had a lot, and I knew we were providing them with a lot, compared to the rest of the world, of course, so Dennis and I began to work at helping our kids appreciate more.

We weren’t as successful as we had hoped to be because gratitude is a choice of the heart, but we began to put those seed thoughts into their brains that they needed to be grateful for what they had.

Nancy: We develop this sense of entitlement.

Barbara: We do.

Nancy: “I’m owed something.” Or we develop comparisons: “Somebody else has more.” I counsel my own heart sometimes and remind myself that if everything material or friendship-wise or the things that I value, if that were all taken away from me and all I had left was Christ and the gospel and salvation from the judgment and the wrath of God, I would still have enough to be more than grateful for all of eternity.

Barbara: Exactly.

Nancy: It starts in the heart.

Barbara: Yes.

Nancy: You can walk through a Hallmark store and see all these pretty cards and thank-you gifts, and that gives you a measure of gratitude, but really, gratitude goes deeper than that. It’s one thing to send thank-you cards and notes, but it’s another thing to have a heart that is truly thankful for the mercies of God and the grace of God—the manifold graces of God poured out on our lives.

Barbara: I agree, and like anything else, I think it can be developed just as any other discipline in our lives or any other attitude in our lives. It can be developed by practice. You don’t become good on the piano, you don’t become a great doctor, you don’t become good at anything without practice and study. I think gratitude is no exception.

Nancy: I think also recognizing the need for gratitude, the lack of gratitude.

Barbara: Yes.

Nancy: As I was writing this book, I found myself preaching to myself. My words often haunt me in the books I write. Recognizing in my own heart these seeds of whining, complaining, and lack of gratitude, it’s obnoxious. It’s insidious, but it just gets such a grip on our lives. I found that one of the things I had to do repeatedly as I was working on this book—and since—is to confess my lack of gratitude, my whining, my complaining about little things and big things. I had to say, “Lord, forgive me.” I had to just identify when the sin of ingratitude is there and then ask Him for the grace of a thankful heart.

Barbara: Yes. I agree.

Nancy: There’s something else that struck me as I was working on this book and just thinking about this subject over a period of months, and that is the consequences of an ungrateful heart—not only what it does to me but also the influence that it has on people around me. Think about it: We really don’t like to be around complaining, whining people. What kind of impact do they have on the culture, on the environment?

Barbara: Exactly. It just doesn’t feel good. At the very core, it’s just not pleasant to be around someone who’s complaining. I have a real tendency when I’m around someone who’s complaining, whether it’s a cashier in a checkout line who’s griping about something or someone, I want to get away from it. It doesn’t feel good, and I don’t like it.

I think we forget that we look like that or sound like that when we do it, too. We feel justified when we complain because whatever the circumstance was was so wrong, and we were so slighted. I think we feel justified when we complain, but I think we forget how it sounds and how it looks and how it comes across.

Nancy: It’s easier to see it in others than to see it in ourselves.

Barbara: Oh, much easier, as is true with most sin.

Nancy: Some people I know are so obsessive about getting rid of germs. They’re always walking around with a can of Lysol, spraying bacteria away off their kitchen cabinets, whatever, but it strikes me that the heart of ingratitude and an ungrateful spirit is really as obnoxious and as dangerous and damaging to the environment as any of those germs could be.

Barbara: I think you’re right.

Nancy: So in our homes, we want to get rid of ingratitude. You talked about the importance you placed on this with your children. You have six children, and they were all little at one time. How did you deal with this issue of ungratefulness, and how did you help your children cultivate a thankful spirit?

Barbara: Honestly, I don’t think we did a really great job because, as I said earlier, being grateful and being thankful is a choice of the heart, and as parents, you don’t control your kids’ hearts. Now, you can influence them and direct them. We had them memorize the verse in Philippians that says, “Do all things without grumbling or disputing.” They memorized it, but they didn’t like it.

Nancy: They grumbled about that?

Barbara: Yes. They grumbled about it. We would remind them when they were complaining, “Do all things without grumbling or disputing,” and they’d just roll their eyes like, “Oh, brother.” We tried to do that influencing; we tried to do that directing. We would correct, and we would train. But it really comes down to a matter of the heart choice. I could make my children cooperate on the outside. We really emphasized saying thank you for everything, and I had my kids write thank-you notes for every gift they ever received.

Nancy: Oh, that’s a lost art.

Barbara: It is, isn’t it?

Nancy: You don’t hear that so much.

Barbara: Actually, some of mine still do it. The training stuck with some of them, which is really fun for me to see.

So I did all of those external training kinds of things, but I realized that all of my efforts weren’t really going to produce a grateful heart because ultimately it was their choice to be grateful in response to what God has done for them.

Nancy: Of course, one of the important things has to be the modeling that the parents do.

Barbara: Exactly.

Nancy: Whether they’re modeling complaining and a negative, griping spirit, or they’re modeling gratitude, and that’s got to be contagious with children one way or the other.

Barbara: Yes, it does. There’s so much that a parent has to model. It can become discouraging at times, but, yes, our kids are watching us. They’re watching everything that we do; they’re watching that we say, and they’re mimicking most of it. So if a parent is not working on his or her own heart of gratitude, it’s going to be communicated to the kids.

Nancy: We’re living in a time when there’s a lot to whine about. There’s a lot of concerns to have—house foreclosures and the economy and bankruptcies and international events and terrorism. There are a lot of things I find that people are really dealing with—fear, with uncertainty, with depression.

Barbara: Yes.

Nancy: I find there’s just this kind of emotional low that a lot of people are experiencing today. And when you look at the circumstances, there are a lot of reasons for that. How do you think personally and as families and as children of God, most importantly, in the midst of a negative environment, difficult times—people losing jobs, etc.—how can we encourage one another to have thankful hearts in the midst of times that aren’t really all that happy . . .

Barbara: . . . all that great. I think we have to be more diligent about what comes into our thinking because I think a steady diet of the news, whether it’s from television or the Internet or newspaper or whatever, it can lead one to be depressed and feel fearful and worried and anxious. If that’s not balanced, or at least have some kind of a counter attack with the truth that God is in control and that no matter how bad it looks or how bad it may get, because it may get much worse before it gets better.

Nancy: Yes. 

Barbara: God is still sovereign. So I think individually we need to monitor what we’re taking in to our brains. You talk about that in your book about how important the mind is. It does start in the heart, but the mind is influencing the emotions of the heart.

Nancy: Yes.

Barbara: If we’re focusing on the negative, then our heart is going to become fearful. But if we’re focusing on God’s providence and His sovereignty and His plan, then our heart is much more inclined to trust and then be grateful.

Nancy: That’s really the whole concept of renewing our minds according to the truth of God’s Word.

Barbara: Yes.

Nancy: That’s why one of the things that I really discipline myself to do is to get more intake of the Word of God into my mind than I do from the external culture. So there’s that recalibrating of our minds and our hearts.

Barbara: I agree with you.

Nancy: And as you said, to focus on the things that are true and lovely and of good report, the things that are sure even when everything around us seems to be unsure and unsteady.

Barbara: Yes. I really agree with you. I think what we put in our minds is crucial. That’s why I’m excited that you wrote the book about gratitude. I think we need that in our culture because there is so much to complain about—on the surface, looking at the news reports, there is a lot to be concerned about. But we need to discipline our minds to be thankful and to be grateful and put into our thinking the things that are right and true.

Nancy: That discipline, that cultivating of a thankful heart is one reason that, at the end of this book, we did a 30-day devotional. It’s the last part of the Choosing Gratitude book. It’s a section called “Growing in Gratitude.” I know myself that I can’t just think about gratitude once, or just hear a program like this, or read a book on thankfulness and then all of a sudden have my thinking change. Transformation is a process. It takes place over the course of time. If you do anything day after day over a period of weeks, it becomes more a part of your thinking.

Barbara: Yes.

Nancy: So we included in this book this 30-day exercise. It involves journaling and becoming attentive to the mercies of God. I hoped through that that those who read this book won’t just read it and put it down but will take the 30-day journey and experience transformation in the way they think and the way they look at all of life.

Barbara: I hope they do, too, Nancy, because I think it’s a great idea. I think it’s a great practical tool. If I remember right, you wrote about a woman who did that in her marriage for 30 days and focused on being grateful for 30 days and what a difference it made.

Nancy: We encourage women all the time to do this with their husbands. They don’t have to tell their husbands, but to do a 30-day husband encouragement challenge, focusing every day on one thing they appreciate about their husband and thanking him for it, expressing that to him.

Barbara: I think it’s a great idea.

Nancy: Oh my goodness. Over the years we’ve received probably thousands of responses from women who’ve taken that 30-day husband encouragement challenge and have said it just changes the way they see their husband. Usually before that 30 days is over, it changes the way the husband sees the wife, too, just because of injecting that attitude of gratitude into the marriage.

Barbara: I think it’s a great idea, Nancy.

I have realized as a new empty nester, when I don’t have the children to focus on, how easy it is to become even more particular or more picky and to notice those flaws in my husband more than I did when I had the kids around. The kids took so much of my focus and now he’s the only one, so my husband gets all of it. If I’m not careful, I can become critical.

So I think your 30-day challenge to wives, to focus on what is good and right about their husbands, is fabulous.

Nancy: On ReviveOurHearts.com they can get more information about how to do that 30-day challenge. We’ll actually send an email every day for 30 days if people sign up for that with practical hints on how to infuse gratitude into your marriage.

Barbara, as I was working on this book, Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy, I came across a number of very moving illustrations of how people made the choice to give thanks when it was really, really hard, when their eyes were full of tears. Invariably, when you talk about this subject of thankfulness or gratefulness, that’s one of the things that comes up—because life really does have hard circumstances.

Barbara: That’s right.

Nancy: It’s a fallen, broken world, and we’re not in the end of Revelation yet.

Barbara: That’s right.

Nancy: I know that you and your family, even within the past couple of years, have walked through what was a major loss that your whole family shared in—a lot of tears. Yet you have found in the midst of that that gratitude really is a powerful weapon against the enemy.

Tell us a little bit about that circumstance and how gratitude has played into it.

Barbara: I’d love to.

About a year and a half ago, in June of 2008, our daughter had her first baby. She had a little girl. Her name is Molly. Molly was born without any previous indication of anything being wrong, but it became apparent pretty quickly that Molly had something wrong with her. She had an aneurism in her brain, and she only lived seven days.

Those seven days were wonderful; they were powerful; they were heart-wrenching, difficult beyond imagination. But in the midst of it, one of the things that we all chose to do (our kids were Rebecca and Jacob, Dennis and myself, Jacob’s parents, Bill and Pam, and all of the siblings who came and went during that week), we all chose to focus on the good things that God was doing in the midst of this.

We expressed gratitude for even giving Molly to us in the first place. Nobody regrets that she came, even though she was only here for seven days.

We expressed gratitude for God’s sovereignty and that He knew what He was doing and that He had good plans for us and He had good plans for Molly’s life, and that was why He gave her to us.

Then beyond that, about a year ago, Thanksgiving a year ago, which was just a few months after Molly had died; it was a particularly difficult time for my daughter and son-in-law as they approached Thanksgiving and thinking about, “How could we be grateful for what God has done this year?” I made my own list of about a dozen things that I was grateful for, and I emailed it to my daughter. I said, “Maybe this will kind of help prime the pump," as we’d been talking about.

One of the things that I remember writing on that list of twelve things was, “I’m so grateful we’re mourning the loss of only a child and not a child and a husband. I’m so grateful that God gave us Molly because she’s changed your lives, and she’s changed our lives, and she’s changed the lives of so many other people. I’m so grateful that God gave you a family to walk this difficult road with you because we are with you; your family on both sides is with you. I’m so thankful that God has surrounded you with people who believe and are praying for you.”

The list went on to twelve or more things. And when I finished it, I knew I hadn’t exhausted it all. I knew there were more, but I finished the list and sent it to her and just said, “I want to encourage you, as difficult as this Thanksgiving season will be for you, to make a list of all those wonderful things that God did lest we forget how He showed up—because He really did show up in those seven days of Molly’s life.”

Nancy: When you made that list, when you give thanks in all things, it doesn’t take away the pain or the loss.

Barbara: No, it doesn’t.

Nancy: What does it do?

Barbara: What I have found that it does is it brings balance.

I think sometimes we think that gratitude and thankfulness is going to be like a magic wand. If I just say, “Thank you, God,” then all of my negative feelings are going to go away.” Well, if the negative feelings are loss and grief because you’ve had a child die, God wants you to feel those things.

Nancy: And God feels those things.

Barbara: And God feels those things. Those are genuine. He’s not wanting to wave the magic wand and have everything be perfect.

What gratitude does is it puts it all into perspective. Gratitude brings balance to those emotions of grief and loss and sadness, and it puts next to the grief and loss and sadness joy and peace and hope for the future. Hope was one of the things we hung onto the hardest during the week of Molly’s life because we know for a fact that we will all see her again, and that hope is because of the Scriptures.

When you give thanks, you’re focusing on those things that are true in God’s Word, and it balances and puts in perspective the grief and the loss that you’re currently going through.

Nancy: I know we have a lot of listeners who are going through some difficult journeys right now in a marriage, in a financial situation, in a family relationship with a prodigal son or daughter—we have listeners who are crying themselves to sleep at night over a son or daughter or grandchild who is far from the Lord—some physical diagnosis, a terminal illness that a listener or loved one is facing. There is no, as you say, magic want that can just make all that pain go away this side of eternity.

Barbara: That’s right.

Nancy: But there is an attitude of gratitude that can give perspective and can be a journey to joy even in the midst of the valley of loss or death or suffering.

So I want to encourage our listeners as we come up on this Thanksgiving season, not only to order a copy of your book on Thanksgiving: A Time to Remember—that’s still available through our resource center—but also a copy of this new book, Choosing Gratitude. I wanat to encourage our listeners to not just read the book, but to take the 30-day journey through that book and to let God recalibrate your heart.

Let Him bring you to that place where you do what we are told to do in the Scripture, and that is to abound in thanksgiving. That just gives me the picture of a creek or stream or river overflowing its banks. Whatever the circumstances are, the call is to choose gratitude, to abound in thanksgiving. When we do, as God’s children, when the world looks at us, and they see that we have lost a child or a grandchild or have this very difficult circumstance, and they see us in the midst of the tears lifting our eyes upward and focusing on the Lord and saying, “God, You are still good, and I worship You,” we make the gospel believable.

Barbara: That’s right.

Nancy: We point people to Christ. That’s the point of it all—to point people to Christ. The attitude of gratitude will do that.

Leslie: The new book by Nancy Leigh DeMoss will help you develop that kind of attractive attitude. It’s called Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy.

We’ll send this new book from Nancy when you donate any amount to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. The program provides a daily attitude adjustment for women around the world, and your gift will help us continue challenging women to embrace God’s purpose for them.

The book Choosing Gratitude is our gift when you make your donation. It will show you how to make this choice even when you don’t feel like it, and you’ll discover why this choice truly will put you on a journey to joy.

Ask for Choosing Gratitude when you call with your donation. The number is 1-800-569-5959, or just visit our website, ReviveOurHearts.com.

We appreciate Barbara Rainey for joining us on today’s program, and we hope you’ll be back with us Monday when Nancy gets back to the letters to the churches in Revelation. Find out why one church needed to wake up.

I hope you’ll stay engaged at your church this weekend; then join us again Monday for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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