Thankfulness? Hell no.

Thankfulness?

Hell no.

This is the last thing I want to write about with where this season of life has taken me. Parker Palmer calls this season Autumn, maybe even Winter. The time where death becomes more and more present – I simply call it my personal hell. This hell on earth is one where love was not enough, relationships have broken, and pointing which way is true north in life is simply disorientating, all the while making the jump into my 30’s.

Needless to say, being thankful is not at the top of my list.

In my youth, I was bombarded with the often-trite messages to rejoice in my suffering – that God was somehow at work in this. Of course He is, but right now it’s really hard to see that. Hindsight is always 20/20. Recently, I began to see that I might have unknowingly connected hope and thankfulness. A connection that I now see simply continues a distorted belief that if I do, believe, or attempt to live [insert any number of moral issues] in the midst of struggles then God will of course deliver me out of them, and ultimately give me what I desire.,

Or there are even the words of comfort that ‘God will never give you more than you can handle’. Yet, the more I examine this statement with the God I see at work in Scripture, the more I see a God that doesn’t promise to give us more than we can handle. But instead, joins us in our suffering no matter how deep the rabbit hole might go.

So in this hell, what is thankfulness? What good is it to be thankful?

At its root, being thankful challenges us to remember. To remember when we received love we did not deserve; encountered grace when all we deserved was opposition; joy instead of frustration; peace in the place of anxiety; hope when all rationality told us differently.

The challenge then lies in our ability to articulate the thankfulness; so it may serve as our personal Ebenezer, as the stones of remembrance in our personal and communal walks of life. Thankfulness asks us to lament to God. Thankfulness begs us to see that not that He has forgotten us but that we might remember where we last encountered Him. For when we are in the midst of hell-everything, even our own selves push us away from God.

May we, as individuals and communities erect these stones of remembrance, of thankfulness, in the midst of suffering, injustice, heartbreak and pain. May we remember that we are not alone, may we remember that God is in our midst, even when we are not aware of it.