11/15/2020
Preacher's Post: 11/15/2020
As Thanksgiving approaches, it gives me an opportunity to talk about something I am always glad to talk about: thankfulness. Have you known someone that was ungrateful? My grandpa was quite the ingrate. I sat through Christmasses where he would openly criticize and groan at gifts given to him. He would always moan about Grandma's wonderful food. Sitting with them in the car would be a journey of hearing him complain about every turn, every blinker, every little thing my Grandma would do. I loved my Grandpa. I love him still, but he was hard to love sometimes.
His case might have been fairly minimal compared to some. We can have an attitude of thankfulness, of gratitude, or we can have an attitude of entitlement. We can go through life as if it is a gift or something that is owed to us. There are a lot of people who go through life as if they are owed everything. You might notice with these people that there is no limit to how much they are owed. Every fulfillment is "about time." Every delay or refusal is a profound injustice.
The person that is thankful for their lives for everything they have can be pleasantly surprised at receiving a gift, can feel joy that someone has given them something they likely don't deserve. In other words, you can have joy with thankfulness. There is no joy in entitlement.
More than that, thankfulness will make us better people. Entitlement just makes us quick to anger and bitterness. Bitterness turns to resentment. Resentment can break out into violence. This happens with alarming regularity. With an entitled attitude, it is so easy to see everything you don't have as having been taken from you by someone else, easy to identify a villain, easy to see anyone with success as having stolen it even if you'd like that same success.
This was a large part of what the N***s did to the Jews. Their success as a group was identified as the result of them stealing it from the German people who truly deserved it. That resentment often results in a lashing out at anyone and anything who we see as being "above us." Any restriction becomes oppression. Any slight is the result of a vast conspiracy.
Thankfulness, by contrast, allows us to accept what we have been given. When the world is a gift, we can embrace it as it is. We can see the people around us as just regular people like us. We can love each other. We can see ourselves clearly and change when we need to because correction is a gift.
When we thank God for the life He has given us, we open ourselves up to all the countless blessings He has in store, rather than consigning ourselves to the misery of the perpetually unsatisfied.
