45 - What is Gratitude, and How Do We Experience It?
Episode Highlights:
This is the first of two episodes on gratitude.
The final episode of the year will drop November 26. In this final episode, we will look back over our first year of “Living with Heart: From Birth to Death.”
We will start the new season December 31 with a new episode that focuses on New Year’s Resolutions.
What is gratitude and how do we experience it? Three factors play a part in experiencing gratitude.
Gratitude begins with our needs. God created us with an abundance of needs.
Whether we like it or not, we are “needy” creations of God.
Having our needs addressed and fulfilled is how gratitude occurs.
Our needs cannot be fulfilled without being in need of God and others.
Gratitude is experienced through relationship.
Needs are covered in great detail in:
Needs of the Heart by Chip Dodd
“Living with Heart: From Birth to Death” podcast, episodes 2-16
The 3 factors that summarize our essential needs are:
We all desire to belong and matter.
We all seek safety and care.
We all crave to experience a full life.
Being in need or being “needy” is not a bad thing or a weakness. It is a human experience over which we are actually powerless.
We are created in ways that we cannot change. We can run from how we are made, but that does not change how we are created.
Many of us are trained to believe that having needs means you are weak.
Most people see having needs as:
a weakness
putting yourself in danger of being rejected.
a negative experience that can keep them from belonging and mattering.
a negative experience that can keep them from being safe and cared for.
an experience that will keep them from having a full life.
However, needs are the doorway into gratitude.
When we take the risk of sharing our feelings and admit our needs as a way of reaching out to have them met, we experience many gifts. These gifts of having our needs heard, valued, and attended to is where gratitude comes from.
Other words and phrases that spring from gratitude are:
appreciation
hopefulness
trust
increased faith
willingness to risk
Gratitude expands us. Refusing to need and not reaching out into risking relationship fulfillment, diminishes us.
Our brains tend to avoid pain. Brains are mostly a pleasure-seeking part of us. The hearts are pain tolerant. We carry our needs in our hearts, and we risk from our hearts.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength…” Psalm 8:2 (ESV)
God is calling strength the cry out of a “needy” baby. Babies are full of need and full of expectation that the cry out of their hearts will be heard and attended to. It begins with being in need.
The rest of the verse says that God has established the strength in the child, “because of your (God’s) foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.” Our neediness is often considered a weakness by the “world’s teachings,” but God calls how we are created as “strength.” We are not to try to change how we are created. We are to grow fully into how we are created, and “keep heart” throughout our lives.
The stanza in the song “It’s A Small World” continues to have tremendous relevance. We really are created to find connection and gratitude through recognizing and sharing our life’s experiences. These experiences are common to everyone. It really is:
“…a world of laughter and a world of tears;
It’s a world of hope and a world of fears;
There is so much that we share that it’s time we are aware,
It’s a small world after all.”
-The Sherman Brothers
Our neediness is the doorway to gratitude. When we connect our hearts with others and God, we inevitably have an increase of thankfulness, appreciation, hopefulness, trust, and even faith in what is to come.
Our willingness to be in need not only expresses our inborn strength, it also cultivates tolerance and compassion for others who are in need.
When we reject our own needs, it ultimately leads us to reject the needs of others.
If we shame ourselves for having needs, and we inevitably do the same thing to others.
There are many people who have not rejected the way God created us to be in need. Gratitude comes from connecting our needs to people and God who attend to them. We can’t help but be grateful for the joy of God’s goodness.
Gratitude comes from:
Being in need.
Letting our needs be known.
Finding out that God wants our good.
Other people will help me find that good.
Other people will help me find the good in life.
Neuroscience continues to communicate that we come into this world looking for who is looking for us. We are relationship creations.
I write in The Voice of the Heart that we are created as emotional and spiritual creatures, created to do one thing in life, and that is to live fully. We cannot live fully, though, without doing so with others and God.
When we find fulfillment through relationship, we develop all kinds of benefits:
We are open to receiving and giving.
We become more generous.
We experience gifts.
We appreciate them.
We are thankful and hopeful.
In tough times, we remember what has happened in the past that is good
(if we let ourselves do so.)
By remembering good things in bad times, we actually return to what was implanted in us that allows us to cling to hope for the future and faith in the possibilities of something better coming.
Ann Voskamp in One Thousand Gifts does a beautiful job of talking about the power of gratitude that is in remembering, to cling to gratitude in difficult, even tragic times. She talks about how in difficult times, our worlds will get “dis-membered.” We are kept “in one piece” and restored to wholeness by “re-membering” ourselves as whole through gratitude.
The Old Testament is full of a call to remember God’s presence, His gifts, His faithfulness, and His love in tough times. We can get stuck in the terrible, the negative, the “isolation” by forgetting where we have experienced the goodness of God and others.
We often get “stuck” in our brains with the anticipation of the negative. We “unstick” ourselves from the negative by allowing our hearts to have the voice of “neediness,” the inborn strength of our ability to reach beyond those experiences towards God and others to “save” us from loss of hope.
The irony is that our neediness, and even our pain, is in us to push us towards gratitude.
Happiness, however, is not gratitude. But, people who are grateful are very often happy.
Happiness is often associated with the “happenings” or occurrences in our lives that keep us from having to be vulnerable or in need. I have enough money, or security, for example, so I will not have to be in need.
Gratitude comes from being in need and finding help.
Grateful people are vulnerable people who know that they will always be in need of others and God. Because they experience security in their “neediness” in a world that is also painful, they tend to be what we call “happy.”
So, grateful (needy) people tend to be “happy,” but happiness does not make us grateful!
People who have gratitude, who have been “touched” or met by God and others with help, tend to interpret things going on in their lives as occurrences not to avoid, but rather, as things to face, feel, and deal with so that they can remain connected in relationship.
People who have gratitude really do look for the “silver lining” in the cloudy days, even in the storms. They look for the “good” because they have experienced it before, and believe that they will experience it again. Therefore, you can see how important remembering is.
We keep and persevere with gratitude by continuing to listen for how God is with us.
There are five ways that God speaks to us, but it is our neediness that opens the doorway for us to hear or see. We have to be open to receive for us to see and hear from God.
Five ways that we make ourselves available to God as we listen to have our needs met:
Prayer and meditation: We actually talk to God and listen to what we hear.
The Word: We read His Word to find His Presence and find His character of love for us.
Other people: We listen for and listen to the care of others and their wisdom. Very often others are put in our lives to be God’s voice.
Illumination: Sometimes, we just get direct clarity from God.
Circumstances: Grateful people ask, “What God is teaching me?” as life happens to them, versus asking “why this has to happen to me.” Grateful people seek to learn more about life and the wisdom of living it, rather than thinking that God is “teaching them a lesson, or punishing them.”
An attitude of gratitude requires that we continue to seek connection, and listen for the help we seek, remembering that it has come before, and so we look for it to come again. This attitude is one of anticipation of appreciation.
The psalms are full of this process of translating pain into promise, and promise into experiencing hope and faith, and appreciation and thankfulness, gratitude.
Gratitude always requires reaching out, though.
Remember, neediness is the doorway to experience gratitude. Once we have experienced it, gratitude becomes a practice of listening, seeing, reaching, risking, trusting, and remembering.
Happiness can be fleeting. Gratitude can be kept.
The Book of Ruth in the Bible is a beautiful story of gratitude that comes from neediness. Naomi, who had lost much, finds gratitude. Ruth, who risked much, finds gratitude. Boaz, who had gratitude in him offered care to those in need out of a heart of generosity, which blessed both Naomi and Ruth, beyond measure. It is an amazing true story.
The story of the bleeding woman in Mark 5 is another story of healing and gratitude. The bleeding woman was isolated and sick. She dared to take a risk of hope with her neediness. She “snuck” up on Jesus and touched the hem of his garment with her hope and need. Jesus stopped in the midst of a crowd of people who were gathered around him. He wanted to know who had touched him. The people around him were confused because everyone was touching Him. “But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.” The story says, “Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.” She knew that she had been healed. Jesus said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (Mark 5:32-34).
Only one person that day experienced amazing gratitude. There are two things that I doubt she ever forgot:
She was healed, and she knew it occurred as a touch from God.
She not only received a healing, she was claimed as a family member of God; she was called, “daughter” by Jesus.
She left the scene connected to others and especially God. Her strength of hope and neediness turned into healing and gratitude.
Gratitude occurs when we find that others outside of us are “for us.” And even more, and most importantly, gratitude occurs when we discover (again, because we often lose it because of life’s painful experiences) that the God of the universe cares for you and me. He does so specifically—and we know it best when we dare to need.
We are healed as the bleeding woman was through gratitude. But it starts with facing and offering our neediness to others and God.
We find gratitude by experiencing that we are really never alone.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center