In June 2021, a popular TV Talent show (America’s Got Talent) featured a singer who went by the name of “Nightbirde.” She was there to sing a song she wrote called “It’s Okay”— which she described as “the story about the last year of my life.”

She knew she was dying with terminal cancer. But before she sang, she said this to the judges and audience:

It’s important that everyone knows I’m so much more than the bad things that happen to me… You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.

Or – as a friend of mine who recently died might have put it:

You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be thankful.

What does it mean to be thankful?

Recently Jessica Stillman noted that “when Grammy award-winning singer LeAnn Rimes spoke to Inc. about her personal success hacks a few years back, one practice rose to the top–writing out a gratitude list every night. It sounds a bit hokey, Rimes acknowledged, but ‘when you start training your mind that way, your mind starts to look for those things. And in tough situations your mind can start shifting into, instead of looking at the problem, problem solving.'” Stillman went on to say:

One of the most basic principles of neuroscience is that ‘neurons that fire together, wire together.’ Meaning the more you think a thought, the more the physical connections enabling that thought build up in the brain, and the easier it is to have that thought again…

As psychologist Christian Jarrett put it, “The more practice you give your brain at feeling and expressing gratitude, the more it adapts to this mindset–you could even think of your brain as having a sort of gratitude ‘muscle’ that can be exercised and strengthened.

For more see: Something to be said about Gratitude, or How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain, or Why Gratitude is so Important.

Keeping a Gratitude Journal

In September I had the good fortune to celebrate the life of a friend who practiced writing in her gratitude journal every day. Good days, bad days; days with heightened joy, and days of deep sadness – including the day her husband died. The practice became so ingrained – so second nature that she looked for reasons to be thankful.

Bill Murphy Jr noticed the same thing when he asked his readers about what they were grateful for:

Quite a few readers wrote to say they were grateful for things that most of us would have a very hard time with.

They didn’t ask: “What do I have to be grateful for?”

Instead, they asked: “How can I learn to be grateful for this experience?

Learning to be Grateful

There is a whole field of positive psychology “focused on the character strengths and behaviours that allow individuals to build a life of meaning and purpose—to move beyond surviving to flourishing.” Gratitude is studied as another mindfulness technique.

But I not looking to be thankful for being thankful, or merely learning a technique or hack of gratitude – I am looking for the more unfathomable reality that our ability to give thanks has its subject and object in the One who made us for Himself, and in whose presence one cannot do anything else but give thanks.

So rather than just finding a hack for thankfulness, why not find the springs of living thanks in Christ, as the Psalmist sings it:

You have shown me the path of life:

in your presence is fullness of joy.

This is more enigma than dogma.