A little Sunday reading

Yesterday afternoon I got a call asking if I could give a talk in church the next day, since two of the three speakers had fallen through at the last minute. It can't have been much more than six months since the last time I gave a talk, and I suspect I only have so many good talks in me, so here's hoping that this keeps me off the bishopric's hit list for awhile.

I didn't have much time to prepare, but as my mom said that probably workd to my advantage in receiving inspiration given that it wasn't my fault that I had to put something together at the last minute. And I swear the end result didn't come entirely from me. I felt very good about it, and it really made me think. The topic was gratitude (what else would it be this week?), and sometimes the most basic topics are actually the hardest because you feel like you're saying things that have already been said. I remember Eric telling me once that he always feels like he has to find some unique angle at which to approach the topic, and I have always felt the same way. Most of the time I spend preparing talks is struggling to find that angle; once I have the angle, the rest is fairly easy. It's not that I feel like I need to stand out from everybody else. It's just that when I listen to a talk, I learn the most when it helps me see something in a way I hadn't seen it before, or at least in a way I wasn't seeing it at the moment.

Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and post my talk here, mostly because it's a pretty efficient way to share it with my family, none of whom every get to hear me speak, and also because it reflects some of the things I've been thinking about this weekend and that's kind of what I use my blog space to record anyway. It's kind of long, so you don't have to read the whole thing (but you should read the story - originally I was just going to post the story, but the punch line lost some of its umph without all the filler material so I just decided to cut ad paste everything). This is also about the most polished thing you'll ever see on this blog, though it's not completely polished because the nice thing about speaking is that you can change little things here and there as you talk if they don't sound quite right.

So without further ado...

On Gratitude
Sunday, November 19, 2006

I want to start out by sharing an experience.

My last car had a safety mechanism that ensured that, once you were out of the car, you could only lock it from the outside, with the car key. This kept you from accidentally locking your keys in the car. My brother, however, had shown me a trick to bypass the safety mechanism by simultaneously lifting the handle on the inside of the door while pressing the lock button, and I had gotten into the bad habit of doing this. It got me into trouble twice—the first time I had no spare car key and had to pay a hefty fee to have a locksmith unlock my car so I could retrieve my keys. The second time I was teaching high school in Virginia, at a school twenty miles away from the house I was living in. I had driven to school as usual, got out of the car, locked and closed the door, and immediately realized that my car keys were sitting on the front seat. I had a spare key this time, but it was twenty miles away. There was nothing I could do—I had to teach class—so I went inside and tried to focus on my work without thinking about what I was going to do at the end of the day. I had roommates, but they wouldn’t be home until late and I didn’t want to make them drive down to my school in Washington D.C. traffic. My only other option was to hire a locksmith, and I already knew how expensive that was.

While I was trying to figure out how to get my keys out of my car, one of the other math teachers in my department asked me where I lived, thought for a second, then said, “If we left right after school, I could take you home to get your spare key.” My first inclination was to tell her that was okay, she didn’t need to do that. I knew that she was not only a teacher, but also a mother and a part-time student, and her time was limited. I didn’t want to make her drive all the way to my house, and then all the way back in D.C. rush hour traffic. But she made it clear that she was not offering just to be nice. She saw that I had a need, and she could fulfill that need, and she was going to fulfill it.

So right after school we hopped in her car and drove twenty miles to Falls Church, and as we pulled up to my house I suddenly realized with a sick feeling that my house keys were with my car keys, back on the seat of my car. This didn’t phase my coworker. She wandered around the house with me and helped me find a window that would open from the outside, then gave me a leg up so I could break in to my house and retrieve my spare key. Traffic was slow going back to the school, but she never once complained or talked about all she had to do that evening. I had every reason to be grateful—she had gotten me out of a situation I didn’t know how to fix and I couldn’t thank her enough.

There’s a reason I chose this particular story, and I’ll come back to it later on, but I’d like to talk about gratitude in general first. I tend to think about gratitude in two different ways. First, there is gratitude toward God for everything He has blessed is with. This is the theme of most scriptures and general conference talks I found when preparing this talk. In the Doctrine and Covenants we are told, “Thou shalt thank the Lord they God in all things” (D&C 59:7)—gratitude toward God is a commandment, and if we truly recognize God’s hand in all things then this gratitude should be natural.

Second, there is gratitude toward other people who love and serve us as we go about our daily lives. Really, these two types of gratitude should be essentially the same. But because I can actually see the people who are serving me in my day-to-day life, the way I experience gratitude toward them sometimes seems very different from the way I experience gratitude toward God. So my talk today is going to be about gratitude in general, and what it really means to show gratitude, but my hope is that by thinking about being thankful to our fellowmen, it can help us better understand how to truly fulfill the commandment to be thankful to God.

Gratitude seems like it should be an easy concept—we have all experienced it and we all know what it is. But sometimes I find that I have a hard time really wrapping my mind around the idea. We talk a lot about feeling grateful or feeling thankful, but if I really think about it, I’m not sure I quite know what gratitude feels like. I know what it feels like to be happy or sad, cynical or optimistic. I know what anger feels like and what love feels like. But when someone does something for me, feelings don’t quite seem to cover what gratitude is. We don’t just feel grateful for something, we feel grateful to someone for something. And so if we are truly grateful, then our gratitude needs to be shared.

When someone does something for us, I don’t think we feel like we are truly grateful unless we have expressed our gratitude. This is not because the other person needs our thanks—people who serve us often do so because they love us and because they are able, not because they feel the need to be thanked. Rather, our need to actually express our gratitude is, I think, for ourselves. We cannot feel grateful unless we are able to recognize what we are grateful for.

The same idea applies to being thankful to God. We are not told to feel grateful, we are told to give thanks. In D&C 59:21, we read that we are to confess God’s hand in all things. We’ve been instructed to express gratitude at the beginning of our prayers. I know that sometimes I fall into the habit of beginning my prayers with “I thank thee for all the blessings thou hast given me,” and maybe quickly naming a few—family, friends, opportunities—and then moving on to what I really want to pray about. In a way this sort of covers all the blessings God is blessing me with on a daily basis, but I am not being truly grateful for them because I am not actually recognizing what each of these blessings is. It isn’t until I really articulate the things I’m thankful for that I really see just how much God has given me and how much he does for me on a daily basis, and it’s then that I am truly grateful.

But when someone helps or serves me in some way, I never quite feel that words are enough. I’ve had this problem as long as I can remember. When I receive a gift or someone goes out of their way to do something for me, I always feel like my “thank you” is shallow. When the gift or the service or the thought behind them mean a lot to me, the words “thank you” themselves seem to have very little meaning in comparison, no matter how many times I say them, and no matter how sincere I sound. I feel like I somehow need to give back, not necessarily out of a sense of obligation or fairness, but because it seems that to be truly grateful I ought to act on my gratitude. If someone serves me, and if I am grateful to them, then I want to return the love and service they have given me.

D&C 59:21 reads “And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments.” Just as we don’t feel truly grateful unless we have somehow returned another person’s love and service, we show our gratitude to God not just by confessing His hand, but by also keeping his commandments, and returning to God a portion of the love He has shown to us.

But how do we repay what has been done for us? Especially when it comes to what God has done for us, which we cannot repay. In Mosiah, King Benjamin said:

“I say unto you, my brethren, that if you should render all the thanks and praise which your whole soul has power to possess, to that God who has created you, and has kept and preserved you, and has caused that ye should rejoice, and has granted that ye should live in peace one with another—

“I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants” (Mosiah 2:20-21).

God has done everything for us—Christ’s atonement for us alone is infinite and by its very nature cannot be repaid. So when we are expressing gratitude to the Lord, how do we respond to our need to show gratitude by giving back?

Going back to gratitude towards other people, when another person serves us, we might wish to do the same for them—someone invites me to dinner, and I invite them to dinner the next week; someone listens to me when I have a problem I’m trying to work through, and I listen to them when they need to talk; someone gives me a gift, and I give them a gift of equal value. But after a time, our repayment can come to seem less like gratitude and more like a zero sum game where we give to keep the balance, and not because we love the other person or because we are grateful for what they have done for us.

When I was driving back from my house with my coworker, I knew she had sacrificed time that she could have spent working with students, preparing the next day’s lesson, working on her own school assignments, or spending time with her husband and children. I knew this was no small thing for her, and I felt almost guilty because I could only repay with words. I wanted her to know how grateful I was, and that I was willing to help her out (even though I couldn’t think how), and as I tried to express my gratitude, feeling very inadequate, she said something that has stuck with me.

“Don’t thank me,” she said, in a tone that implied that this was not up for debate. “Just do the same thing for someone else when you have the chance.”

To me, that statement right there is what true gratitude is. It’s not about feeling thankful, it’s not about saying thank you, and it’s not even about repaying an act of kindness with another act of kindness. Gratitude is a state of being, a love for all people because you have been shown love and want to share it, a willingness to serve because you have been served and want others to experience what you have experienced. When we are truly grateful for something someone has done for us, we know we are grateful because it changes us and because it gives us the ability and desire to reach out to other people, not just those we are grateful towards, and to change them as well.

This idea helps me to think about what it means to be grateful to the Lord. For our own sakes, I think it is important to confess His hand in all things, to make a conscious effort to tell Him exactly what we are thankful for, so that we are able to recognize His blessings in our lives. But that is not where gratitude toward the Lord ends. Feeling thankful and expressing our thanks ought to give us the desire to share God’s love with other people.

One of my favorite hymns is "Savior, Redeemer of My Soul," and I think the first two verses express this idea well:

Savior, Redeemer of my soul,
Whose mighty hand hath made me whole,
Whose wondrous pow’r hath raised me up
And filled with sweet my bitter cup!
What tongue my gratitude can tell,
O gracious God of Israel.

Never can I repay thee, Lord,
But I can love thee. Thy pure word,
Hath it not been my one delight,
My joy by day, my dream by night?
Then let my lips proclaim it still,
And all my life reflect thy will.

Though we cannot repay God, we can love Him and serve Him and be an instrument in His hands to bless the lives of other people in the world. And though we can and should express our gratitude to God in our words and prayers, to be truly grateful means letting our feelings of thankfulness change us, and it means expressing our gratitude by serving God, and serving God by serving our fellow beings.

I’d like to end with my testimony. I am so grateful for this gospel and for the ways that my life has been blessed, and I am grateful that I have been blessed to know the source of all that is good in my life. I’m thankful most of all for Jesus Christ and His Atonement and the way I have seen it work in my own life. My hope is that I can not only remember these things as I go about my life, but that I can show my gratitude in love and service for the Lord and for other people, and I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.