12 Important Life Lessons I Learned From Counting Gifts
It’s been almost ten years now, but can remember that first icy winter after moving to Minnesota as if it were yesterday. I was a brand-new mom living in a new state far from friends and family. My husband was gone a lot for work and school, and I struggled to keep a positive outlook through long and lonely days at home with a newborn.
A challenge to begin counting gifts
I had stumbled upon a book called One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp which stirred up some hope within me, and I determined to take her up on the challenge of slowly counting up a thousand things to be thankful for. It seemed an almost insurmountable task at first for someone in the throes of postpartum depression. But God’s good gifts are everywhere, and he can give even the downcast soul the eyes to see them.
Through this new, disciplined practice of gratitude (along with the kindness of some new, community-minded friends and neighbors who reached out to me during that time), God pulled me out of that season of struggle and into a place where I could invite others into gratitude, community, and joy.
12 lessons I learned from counting gifts
I’ll admit that, initially, the idea of counting gifts seemed trite, but along the way, I discovered some profound and transformational truths. Here’s what I learned:
1) Don’t let your high hopes or your personal limitations keep you from pursuing gratitude (or anything else worth pursuing).
In the beginning, I had planned to write a minimum of five things per day that I was thankful for. When I couldn’t keep up with that, it became a certain number of things per week. When I couldn’t keep up with that either, I was tempted to scrap the whole thing. But I knew I needed to give myself grace and keep going with this new practice of gratitude because the purpose was not to keep up with a program or even to reach a goal.
I wanted to have an encounter with God and give him the thanks he deserves for the many gifts I knew were lurking in my life. I also wanted to become a person of gratitude and discover the joy I knew I was lacking. I knew every little bit of gratitude would help, even if I didn’t make it to my goal, but none of those things would happen if I quit. So I picked it back up again. In the end, it was not so hard at all to find 1,000 gifts!
2) There are always things to be thankful for.
Sometimes the gratitude flowed naturally. Other times it took intentionality. But there are always gifts to find. And most of the time, once I’d come up with one thing to be thankful for, dozens more would flow through my pen, turning into lists much longer than I had planned. Suddenly I’d find myself smiling big as I’d think back on my day and try to write them all down. This was the beginning of new joy welling up in my heart.
3) When gratitude is a habit, it changes your brain.
When I went about my usual activities knowing that I would sit down at the close of day to write what gifts I had received, I soon began looking for those gifts from the moment I woke up. I started paying attention to the goodness in my life, looking expectantly for it, and never failing to find it. After a while, I could feel the perspective shift. I was training my brain to look for the good and I was getting practice being thankful for just about everything. Negative thinking and my tendency toward complaint were being replaced by positivity, contentment, and hope!
4) Mundane things are worth being thankful for.
I found that looking for the simple gifts like an elegant shadow or the striations in a grapefruit is not petty—it can bring a sense of wonder and awe toward life and its Creator that can be easy to lose sight of in our daily hustle and bustle.
5) Profound things are worth being thankful for.
It is not only the tangible things around us that matter. Some of the best gifts are the ones that can’t be seen and the things that have eternal value.
6) Gratitude should be directed toward the Giver.
A general sense of gratitude is not enough to be truly transformative. You do not thank a gift, you thank the Giver. I sometimes battled to remember that my gift counting was not an optimism list or a pretty things list, it was supposed to be me thanking God himself, the Creator of every good and perfect gift in my life. Sometimes I had to put the list aside and discipline myself to go straight to God and thank him directly, “off-the-record,” rather than letting it be about my list and keeping up with a project.
7) It doesn’t matter what someone else thinks of what I like or what I’m thankful for.
I shared some of my gratitude list publicly, and I had to remind myself on occasion that it was for myself and for God, not for others. I didn’t need to worry about what anyone was going to think of what I said, how I said it, or what I neglected to include. It was ok if I found joy in something others might think was silly, or if I felt particularly thankful for a certain relative or friend that day but didn’t mention every other relative and friend.
8) There can be a richness in repetition.
At first, I tried to avoid repeating myself as I counted up to a thousand gifts. Wouldn’t that be cheating, or unoriginal at best? I kept feeling grateful for some of the same things repeatedly, though, and I soon began to find great delight in those instances. The gratitude became deeper with multiple occurrences because I began to realize just how much of a blessing those particular things were in my life.
9) A habit of ingratitude takes some work to break.
One of the most startling and frustrating discoveries I made through the process was how quick I was to complain. There were many times when I so badly wanted to write, “I am thankful for _______, even though ________.” But as I began to train myself to leave the “but’s” out of my list, it became a little easier to leave them out of my thoughts.
While I don’t want to dismiss very real feelings in myself or in others, I wonder what would happen if we flipped the script to say, “Even though ______, I am thankful for _______”? That habit, in time, just may turn into a refrain of, “No matter what . . . I am thankful.”
10) True gratitude requires humility.
In the places where I found it difficult to be thankful, I discovered pride and a sense of entitlement. If I believed I deserved something and didn’t have it, bitterness would grow. If I believed I deserved something and did have it, the gratitude didn’t run very deep at all and was not truly joy-producing. A sense of entitlement will steal our joy every time, but if we see everything as an undeserved gift freely given, gratitude will flow from our hearts and produce deep joy.
11) Giving thanks in difficult circumstances is the purest form of gratitude.
It is in the midst of our struggles, not our moments of ease, where the posture of gratitude we’ve chosen to adopt is shown to be authentic. It’s also where it truly makes a difference. When we can find a way to be thankful in the hard places, even for the hard places, we find glimmers of hope that keep us from sinking into the depths of despair.
It’s also when the people around us can see that our faith in Jesus is genuine and makes a deep-down difference to how we field what life throws our way. As Philippians 2:14-16 suggests, when we can live through hardship without complaint, we shine bright for Him.
12) Gratitude is a choice.
The hard things are the fork in the road where we get to choose between a life of joy and a life of unhappiness. Do I choose gratitude when I’m hurting? When the news at the doctor’s office isn’t good? Will I even just choose to be thankful when I’m stuck in traffic? Because if I don’t choose to be thankful in those moments, the whole gratitude exercise is kind of pointless. If it doesn’t run deep enough to endure through hard things, then it was all just trite and not transformative.
Counting gifts slowly changed my life
I still battled ingratitude after this experience of counting gifts, one in which I learned so many important truths. Yet as I began to choose gratitude not only for what I did have but even for the things I didn’t have and the good that could somehow come from that, joy began to seep in. That joy was slow and subtle, but it grew strong enough to lift me out of postpartum depression and even to trust God with relative ease through a miscarriage at the end of that year.
I have not mastered this life of gratitude by any means. I don’t know if I ever will. Still, I believe that intentionally pursuing a life of gratitude is imperative. Our lives are full to the brim with undeserved gifts from God. Our very life and breath is a priceless gift, and gratitude for it is right and good. It is also incredibly life-giving in itself and it paves the way to real joy.
Meet Jennifer Wier
Jennifer Wier is a writer, professional counselor, military wife, and mom of four currently stationed in the wilds of Alaska. She writes about the intersection of life and faith in the hopes of painting a picture of what living our daily lives walking with Jesus can look like for those who haven’t yet experienced it, and to encourage those of us already walking with Him to fully embrace both His sweet, sweet grace and His call to holiness.
Where to find her . . .
Begin Within is a series to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well. Gratitude is a theme we talk about often around here because it ties so closely into other missional living rhythms. Practicing gratitude reminds to keep our hearts soft and expectant and our eyes open. Therefore, the more we embrace gratitude, the easier it becomes to truly see our neighbors and where we can join what God is already doing in our neighborhoods.
If you would like to contribute to Begin Within, you can find the submission guidelines here.
Creating Ripples
If you would like to cultivate rhythms in addition to gratitude that will empower you live on mission in your neighborhood, check out Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. This small book will help you make a big impact in your neighborhood as you learn to let missional living flow from the inside out. Get the 30-day missional living challenge free when you purchase the book.
