The words and verses are written everywhere, pasted over images of pastel flowers, then plastered onto mugs and magnets: Give Thanks!
They’re carefully calligraphed across reclaimed-wood wall plaques: Be Thankful!
More than that, they’re repeated over and over in Scripture:
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1Thessalonians 5:16-18
We all know the command. We can’t finagle the translation of any Greek words to get out of it, though I’ve wished I could on days when joy feels far away.
For me, the idea of gratitude comes with baggage. I live with disabling chronic pain, and have spent much of my life navigating trauma, poverty, and grief. When held alongside all of those things, “be thankful” lands more like an uncaring dismissal than a loving invitation.
Maybe you’ve felt that, too.
I’m learning that the issue isn’t with gratitude itself, but how we’ve so often been taught to approach it. Let’s untangle a couple of those traps we fall into, and then move toward a thankfulness that’s more like secure attachment: honest, embodied, responsive to presence.
Thankfulness Does Not Mean Ignoring Pain
This matters deeply.
Flip open the Psalms (think 12, 86, 94) and you’ll find songs full of worship and anguish in the same breath. Praise intertwined with protest. Lament wrapped in worship.
Pain doesn’t disqualify praise; it often deepens it.
This is important to say because cheerful church cultures can unknowingly wield thankfulness like a weapon, silencing suffering to avoid the discomfort of grief or doubt. We trade attachment for avoidance, saying “God is good!” through a forced smile, trying with all our might to be easy to love. I’ve done it in sanctuaries, doctors’ offices, and through long nights when pain radiates within me.
That’s not gratitude. In the mental health world, it is known as spiritual bypassing: using spiritual practices or language to jump over the hard and holy work of facing what hurts. Bypassing disconnects us from our bodies, our stories, and our experience of God’s presence.
In prayer, we’re invited to do the opposite: to slow down, breathe deeply, and let Love witness what we hide. Gratitude doesn’t bypass our wounds and longings, it walks right alongside them.
Thank God for what is good and cry with Him about what is not.
Bring your whole story. Your whole self.
God crafted us in both strength and fragility.
He loves every aching bit.
Thankfulness Is Not Comparison
“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men…’” Luke 18:10
The Pharisee’s prayer here is not thanks-giving at all. His words are a tool to prop himself up by pushing another down. It is pride masquerading as gratitude, and comparison masquerading as thoughtful introspection.
Whether it’s religious superiority or the subtle comparison we teach kids (“Eat your dinner, starving kids would be grateful to have this”), all of it keeps us at a distance from each other and from God. It says I’m okay because they’re not.
Like spiritual bypassing, this kind of thankfulness is hollow, focusing more on things than on the Giver of All Good Things (James 1:17). This can seem benign, but when we look at someone else’s plate, we’re always at risk of falling into the comparison trap, puffing up our own ego instead of truly thanking God. In the parable, Jesus goes on to describe another person who came to the temple that day. This one, the tax collector, prayed differently, crying “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Jesus goes on to applaud this man because of his humility.
Humility is, without question, the rich soil of thanksgiving.
If Biblical thankfulness isn’t spiritual bypassing or comparison, what is it? And how do we live it out? Let’s look now at the heart of thankfulness.
Thankfulness is Relational and Responsive
God doesn’t need our compliments, so when He asks us to be thankful, it isn’t to stroke His own heavenly ego or to tack on to our spiritual agenda. What God wants, what He always-and-forever wants, is a continuously connected, intimately loving and healing relationship with us (Ephesians 2:4-7).
Giving thanks is an attachment-based movement toward the One who has moved toward us. Just as we become closer to our friends, spouse, or children when we actively look for and call out the things of beauty in them, we will find more intimacy with God when we move away from a to-do list and move into awe and wonder at the God of love, creator of sunsets and the Milky Way. Although gratitude for gratitude’s sake is a healthy discipline for all, God is calling us to something much bigger and deeper-less a practice of positivity and more a posture of noticing.
“Tune my heart to sing Thy grace” is how the hymn-writer puts it. Thankfulness is the grace-singing response to our attunement with God. It baptizes the mundane and bursts up from worldly waters dripping with a heavenly hymn.
What Does This Look Like?
This all sounds great in theory, but what does it actually mean in the monotonous and sometimes bleak reality of daily life? For me, gratitude is usually a small, quiet, and imperfect offering. As I go throughout my day, I simply (though not always easily) look for the holy of God. I scavenge for beauty, trying to let it be bigger than my pain. Sometimes this comes naturally, and other times it’s more like what Hebrews 13:5 calls a “sacrifice of praise.”
When I’m with friends, I belly laugh and marvel at the God who created humor and joy. His image is carved into each and every person we encounter.
Isn’t He beautiful?
Thank you, Creator.
When my head throbs and my body feels like a burning room I can’t escape, I cry to God, and ask Him to sit with me.
I thank Him for seeing me and for being a God who knows about suffering and aloneness. I may or may not thank God for my chronic pain and the ways He has redeemed it in my life. I’m not always thankful for that. But I can almost always find gratitude for the way He meets me in the crushing middle of it, offering His presence in both the stillness and the chaos of my suffering.
Thank you, Holy Spirit.
When I anticipate another holiday without the family I’d always imagined, I practice welcoming the belonging of God. And yes, some days I am too raw to give thanks for all this brokenness, but I often can whisper thanks that hold my story in love. I sit in my grief and search the horizon for color, falling leaves, the way golden hour casts waterfalls of glowing light across the dining room, absurd joys, and the break-through of laughter in the middle of my tears. I am filled with awe at a God who knows what it’s like to be so split-wide by both ache and amazement.
Thank you, Jesus.
Jeremiah 29:13 says “You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with your whole heart.” When we strip away the bypassing and let go of the comparison, when we search honestly, wholeheartedly, scouring the earth, the faces of others, and the stories of our lives, I believe we will discover a God of tenderness and beauty that will awaken us to gratitude.
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:
“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
So pay attention.
Look for beauty.
Look for God.
Even in the darkness, you might just find you’re standing on holy ground.
Respond.
Take off your shoes.
Give thanks!
About the Author
Alyssa Zimmerman, like you, is wildly loved by God. The nearness of God in prayer has held her through every season of life. She is passionate about inviting others into that same intimacy through conversations, writing, curating contemplative prayer rooms, and in her role as Deacon of Prayer at Union Chapel.
Alyssa is a PNW native, and feels most at home among trees, mountains, oceans, and drizzling rain. Though disabling chronic pain shapes many of her daily rhythms, she is committed to figuring out a thing called community and what it looks like to be a people of prayer, love, and justice in a heartbreaking world. She is a lover of silence and wit, an extra-spicy chai drinker, and an overly enthusiastic taker of mediocre phone pics. Mostly, though, she is a confusing blend of reverence and irreverence, trying to live an undivided life of communion with God. Alyssa deeply believes that one day, “every sad thing will become untrue,” and even the deepest ruptures and wounds, both within and without, will somehow be gathered into a story of Love
