Take Heart

Gratitude Is About Changing Our Perspective

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 1 • Episode 14

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Carrie shares with us how she began to learn the practice of gratefulness during a difficult hospital stay and what that has taught her about God and how He provides.

November 9, 2020

Key Topics/Timestamps:

  • 0:21:    Intro
  • 1:00:    A Virtue
  • 2:14:    A Heavenly Perspective
  • 4:04:    God’s “ask”
  • 5:00:    A Practice & A Discipline
  • 9:02:    After Lament
  • 10:26:  The Why
  • 11:33:  The How
  • 12:52:  Psalms of Gratitude
  • 13:47:  Outro

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Welcome to Take Heart, where our goal is to give you hope, insight and encouragement so you can flourish in your journey as a Special Needs Mom. Each week Sara, Amy, and Carrie will explore a theme, share an inspiring story, a practical tip, and an encouraging blessing using their combined experience of over 30 years of parenting special needs children. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Happy Tuesday. It’s Carrie M Holt today. Our topic for November is gratitude or thankfulness. It’s a topic that we often hear about in November because of our American holiday of Thanksgiving. 

I have to admit, thankfulness or possibly looking at the bright side of life isn’t my strong suit. I am a perfectionist, so I’m always looking for ways to improve or seeing all of my flaws, so being thankful isn’t something that has always come easy for me. I often look at my hard road of parenting my medically complex child, and I am afraid, angry and hurting. It’s not that I’m a glass half-empty kind of person, I prefer to call myself a realist. I like to know what to expect, so I’m not blind-sided by life. God has quite the sense of humor, though, in seeing to bless me with a special needs child. He knows me so well, and I know that He has been teaching me flexibility and trust because I want to be in control. And through this I have also learned the virtue of gratefulness. 

So, what is it about gratefulness and why is it important? How do we have it when life is so hard? I think it has a little bit to do with looking at our circumstances through a heavenly perspective.

Back in 2002, Nichole Nordeman released an album called Woven and Spun and on it was a song called Gratitude. Its thoughtful prayerful lyrics are beautiful and poignant. It’s essentially formatted like a prayer. It’s a prayer for rain and all the reasons why we need the rain, but yet if God chooses not to give the rain, we can be grateful for the sun that warms us. It’s a prayer for daily bread, food, and shelter, but if that shelter doesn’t cover our heads, then maybe we’re grateful for the glimpse of the stars shining in the heavenly night sky.

Thankfulness is related to our perspective about our situation. It’s living in hope, longing for what we do not have, but learning to be content with what we do have. Think about how grateful the thirsty person is for water in a desert or running a marathon, as opposed to the family fleeing the flood waters during a hurricane. Think about the perspective of a fireman, who has been fighting these fires out west, versus the midwestern family’s view of a campfire as they gather around on a chilly night roasting marshmallows. I have often thought about this one. What about the northerner who flees to Florida in January when it’s only about 55 degrees, and they gladly throw on their shorts and flip flops, while the local people are bundling up in their hats, coats, and gloves. It’s all about perspective.  

I think gratefulness is important because God is asking us to be grateful and you never know what it might do for your spirit. In first Thessalonians 5:18, it says “In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” I’ve heard it said that this verse doesn’t tell us that we have to be thankful for the circumstances, but in them. But what is it about this “in everything” give thanks? As a special needs mom, you might be thinking - there is nothing I possibly have to be grateful for in my current circumstances. This is a rough road. It’s one we didn’t ask for. We’re often tired, fighting, advocating. We’re exhausted. We can’t be grateful “in everything”. This life is hard.

It’s important to note that becoming grateful is a practice and a discipline. In Jan Karon’s book In This Mountain, her character Father Tim is giving a sermon about this verse in I Thessalonians. Now, let me just tell you that author, Jan, she can preach quite a sermon. This is what he says, “…it’s easy to have a grateful heart for food and shelter, love, health and peace. But what about the hard stuff, the stuff that darkens your world and wounds you to the quick? Just what is this everything business? It’s the hook. It’s the key. Everything is the word on which this whole powerful command stands and has its being.” It means being thankful “in loss of all kinds. In illness. In depression. In grief. In failure. Some of us have been in trying circumstances these last months. Unsettling. Unremitting. Even, we sometimes think, unbearable. Dear God, we pray, stop this! Fix that! Bless us - and step on it. But our obedience will say, “Father I don’t know why you’re causing or allowing this hard thing to happen, but I’m going to give thanks in it because you ask me to. I’m going to trust You to have a purpose for it that I can’t know and may never know. Bottom line. You’re God - and that’s good enough for me.” It is really hard to give thanks in the hard parts of our child’s diagnosis: the endless phone calls, the fights with insurance, the tantrums in the store, running to doctor appointments and therapy, watching your child go through pain and surgery, and the seemingly endless chaos that invades our lives. But it's amazing when we just take one step of this practice of gratefulness that more of it begins to pour out. 

I’ve mentioned in a previous podcast that when our son was around a month old he ended up in the pediatric intensive care unit fighting for his life. His airway was collapsing and his vocal cords were paralyzed. We would ride the rollercoaster of - he would wear a CPAP mask, then he would do okay for a day or two, and they would move him to a nasal canal with oxygen. He would get upset, code, turn blue, and we would start the ride all over again. During that time I lived in so much fear and I really truly did not know which end was up. We had two toddler boys at home that were 3 1/2 and just turning 2 during that hospital stay. I honestly look back and wonder how we ever survived those days. One day when I was feeling especially low, I’m not sure what brought it to mind, but I decided to sit down with my journal and make a list of the things I was thankful for in the middle of that really dark place of the ICU. 

As I began to make my list, there were silly things like: the parking being free at the hospital; our children’s hospital is downtown, not having to pay the copay for the ER visit the second time because we had two hospital stays that were less than 14 days apart. Think about how absurd that sounds. We had two hospital stays, the one right when our son was born, he was in for eight days, and then twelve days later he went back in with respiratory failure. I realized that I could be grateful because we didn’t have to pay that $100 copay because these stays were so close together. But it was; it was the bright side of that situation. There were other things to be grateful for too: our church bringing us meals, people taking care of our kids. There were weeks I had no idea who was going to take care of our other two boys and then at the last minute somebody would step in. 

One thing that I’ve learned is that thankfulness or gratefulness often comes after lament or grieving. We do have to acknowledge our pain and our loss and grieve it. In Psalms 13, David laments that he feels like God has forsaken him. He asks God why He has hid His face. “Answer me,” he says. In the end of that chapter, he ends with words about trust and that his heart rejoices in the Lord’s salvation. He says, “I will sing to the Lord because He deals bountifully with me.” He turns to God in thankfulness for his provision, faithfulness and presence. One of the things that I’ve learned lately about these Psalms is that David didn’t write this in one sitting. He was a poet, a song-writer. Think in modern terms about how long it takes for singers and songwriters to write their music or for a poet to write their poetry; it’s days, weeks, maybe even months and years. It takes time. David had to process his “hard” and cry out to HIm in his anger and pain, lamenting and grieving. Then later as God gives him new perspective, his lament and grief turns to gratefulness. 

Why is gratefulness so important? I think one of the keys is that it does help us to take our eyes off ourselves and our circumstances and focus on two things.

1. The Giver of the gifts. Who is God? We can’t just be thankful. We need to be thankful to someone. When someone makes you a wonderful meal, you don't just say I'm thankful for this meal. You thank the person who has created it and made it for you. Well, God is our all sustaining powerful Creator. What do we know about His character? He loves you; He sees you, and He wants to work everything together for your good. 

2. The second thing is we can look at the way He is providing in those hard moments. When you stop to list the ways that He has been providing for you, it’s amazing how your heart lightens. You become a little bit more cheerful and realize that it’s not as bad as you thought.  

So, what are some ways to turn your hard into gratefulness? Or at least to find the gratefulness in the hard that is your life of a special needs mom.

1. Lament the hard. It’s okay to cry out to God about your trials. In fact it takes quite a bit of faith to be honest with Him about your pain, anger, and ask Him for relief.

2. Change your focus. Instead of focusing on all the ways that life is difficult. How has God provided? An anonymous person said, “Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” If all you have to be thankful for is that you got out of bed in the morning, and you were able to make breakfast or lunch or dinner for your kids, start there. 

3. Keep a practice of a journal. Another practical way that I have been learning, and again this is going to be a practice. It's something that I don't always do well, but there's a Line a Day journal, which is sold on Amazon. You can buy them in five year increments, and it's really short - just a few lines. Every day, I try to write in that journal about what I have to be grateful for and where I have seen God's provision.

So, now I would like to end with a prayer of thankfulness to God, which is a collection of some of David’s Psalms:

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear (27:1) The LORD is my strength and my shield; in Him my heart trusts, and I am helped; my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him. (28:1) I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living (27:13) The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, and a stronghold in times of trouble. And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek you. (9:9-10) But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because He has dealt bountifully with me. (13:6) 

I want to thank you for joining us this week on Take Heart: a podcast for special needs mom by special needs mom. Today, we’ve been chatting about Gratefulness. Listen in next week as Sara Clime shares her special needs journey and her thoughts on gratefulness. Our prayer each week is for your heart to be encouraged and for you to know you are not alone. We are truly grateful that you're walking on this journey with us. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, and please leave a review. You can follow us on Instagram at Take Heart Special Moms. If you have any questions or comments, please follow the links in our show notes. If you prefer to read the transcript for the podcast, the link for that is also in the show notes. Please feel free to reach out to us at any time; we would love to hear your story. I also wanted to let you know that we now have a website. You can find us at www.takeheartspecialmoms.com, where you can find things out about our show, read the show notes and also find direct links to the podcast. We will also be having an email signup list soon, letting you know what we're up to. You can sign up at our website and that is www.takeheartspecialmoms.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next Tuesday.