Ask me what my superpower is and I’ll answer with no hesitation: It is gratitude.
I have a rich spiritual life supported by many practices including labyrinth-walking, prayer, Scripture memorization, active participation in my faith community, and meditation — especially Loving Kindness meditation. But of all my practices, the one that is most powerful in this season of my life is gratitude.
Cathy Payne Anderson
Frances Weller, a therapist who deals primarily with grief, wrote, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.” I first heard him speak about this just a few weeks before my husband of 32 years was diagnosed with the cancer that would quickly take him from us. This image of balancing grief and gratitude carried me through that horrific season. Anytime grief threatened to overwhelm me, I stopped and began to name all the reasons I had for gratitude in that moment:
- Friends who loved me and showed up day after day
- Good insurance
- Doctors I knew, loved and trusted from nearly 15 years at Kaiser Permanente of Georgia
- Enough time and money and resources to be present with Bruce every day during that journey.
There was (and is) so much to be thankful for. It wasn’t that I replaced my grief with gratitude. Instead, I added gratitude to the mix — let it keep my soul in balance during the most difficult season of my life.
Those of you who have known me for a while know I’ve had a lifelong struggle with clinical depression and anxiety. My problem is physiological, not just emotional. My body doesn’t process anxiety appropriately. If I fall into a full-blown anxiety event, chemicals in my body create a cascading process that is not easily interrupted. With years of therapy, the right medication and a whole lot of spiritual practice, my mental health is pretty good most of the time. So now, when anxiety presents itself in my day-to-day life, I take what I learned from that season of grief and wrap my arms and my heart around some gratitude. I am stunned at the power that simple choice can have on my health.
“When anxiety presents itself in my day-to-day life, I take what I learned from that season of grief and wrap my arms and my heart around some gratitude.”
The power of gratitude to change my situation is outlined in a Scripture passage I memorized as a young child, Philippians 4:6-7 — “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
When I talk to patients about this gratitude practice, I tell them about this verse from my faith tradition. I tell them about peace that makes no sense in a given situation but comes nonetheless and does, indeed, guard my heart.
Recently I’ve been praying with and for a friend who needs God to intervene to solve a problem that is too big for him to solve alone. Yesterday I found myself praying all day “please please please please help him.”
My theology of prayer is complicated, to say the least. I don’t believe God is a big-ole vending machine — insert two prayers, push a button and out comes the prize. I do, however, believe Scripture is true. So when Scripture tells us, “Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray” — well, that is what I should be doing. I also believe God speaks in inexplicable ways.
So when I saw this message in an old journal I was reading yesterday, I took it to heart: “Give thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.”
I decided my prayer needed to change from “please” to “thanks.” So today, each time the word “please” starts to come out of my mouth, I stop and change it to “thanks.” Thanks that God is already ahead of us in this problem. Thanks for the solution that is on the way. Thanks that God loves my friend more than I do and has a good plan for him. Thanks that the Great God of the Universe cares enough to listen whenever I pray — with or without gratitude, with or without anxiety.
This leads me to the truth that gratitude beats anxiety every time. There’s a quote by Ann Voskamp that I love:
No amount of regret changes the past,
No amount of anxiety changes the future,
Any amount of gratitude changes the present.
Amen and amen and amen. Beloveds, will you join me in praying prayers of thanks today for all the ways God is taking care of each of us? The world is still on fire. Violence and hatred are still all around us. Life is still scary. But God is still God and I believe in the end, God will matter more than all the rest.
Let’s keep bringing all the light we can to all the dark corners we can find. And let’s do it with gratitude in our hearts and on our lips. God has us. Always has. Always will.
Cathy Anderson serves as a clinical chaplain in Kennesaw, Ga.
Related articles:
Upside Down Advent: Anxiety versus peace
When the Holy Spirit joined my Uber ride | Opinion by Mark Wingfield