How to Accept Thanks When It Makes You Squirm

I’m quick to dismiss a thank you. Chalk it up to niceness, and spin it negative. What you really mean to say is I’m stubborn, impulsive, and a perfectionist. Or I’ll downplay it as nothing because it was less than what I’d intended and undeserving of thanks. That, or I’ll redirect the conversation back to you because the attention makes me squirm a little inside.

It took a conversation with a handful of neighbors for me to name it aloud to any other besides my husband. We meet midweek over lunch hour and practice letting each other in. As in, to the down-beneath things that spin us toward or away from God. The lies we’re exchanging for God’s truth. The practices that keep our heads up and our hearts in the right place. Nicole Unice’s The Struggle Is Real study is a perfect launch pad for these honest conversations.

If you’ve joined us for the November Thank Somebody Challenge, you’ve been writing a lot of thank yous. Mailing cards, leaving notes, sending heartfelt texts or voice messages for the people who matter to you. But for some of us, that part feels natural. What’s a whole lot harder is when the thank you comes our way.

Can we pretend for a moment that you’re part of this conversation in my living room? There’s an open seat next to me, with a soft, fuzzy throw if we keep the heat too low. It’s safe here to admit it’s a little easier to say thanks than to receive it. That you’re wired as an encourager, love words, and use them to build others up—but it’s uncomfortable to let others do the same for you.

It’s easier to say thanks than to receive it_Twyla Franz quote for The Uncommon Normal

Maybe, like me, you struggle to believe that you matter. It pops up in little ways that are easy to miss. Like conversations you’ve kept quiet because you don’t think you have value to add. Preferences you insist you don’t have. Needs you’d never tell someone else. Thank yous you’ve redirected.

I’m as Enneagram 9 as they come. I get the lie that says you’re not enough.

You can’t outrun it.
Outwork it.
Ignore it.
But here’s what you can do. You can talk with God about it. Come honest and simply let Him love you.

Four Practices That Help Me Graciously Accept A Thank You

Whether you’re completing the challenge or not, let’s talk thank yous and how to get better about accepting them. With grace, grit, and humility, because honestly, it takes all three. A few practices that are helping me with this are

1) Spending Time Every Morning On My Knees

It changes the conversation because the physical posture of surrender helps my heart stay tender. Grief and raw-edged questions first brought me here to this spot on the floor, and now it’s become a morning practice to kneel, behold His weighty glory, rest in His compassionate gaze. Sometimes I have many words. Sometimes very few. I’ve tear-soaked the floor, journal pages, worship song lyrics penned in margins of my Bible.

And I’ve learned here to leave the things I’m carrying at the feet of Jesus. Trade lie for truth. Accept the relentless way God loves me when I’m powerless to earn it.

Learn more HERE.

2) Playing Raw Worship On Repeat

I was asked in a recent interview what song I’m playing on repeat, and I felt suddenly seen. If you haven’t tried playing a single worship song that ushers you into the sweet presence of Jesus on repeat, I challenge you to give it a try. The words get stuck in your head. Run through your mind if you wake up in the middle of the night. I find it incredibly helpful.

Want to know the songs I play on repeat? Grab my playlist HERE.

3) Bringing My Honest Self To Stuff I’d Only Tell God, Jennifer Dukes Lee’s Guided Journal

If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about this journal a lot. And it’s because it helps you get real with God and also open up to other people—and those are the two things I’m most passionate about. Follow @stuffidonlytellgod to learn more—and grab a copy anywhere books are sold.

4) Talking Real With Safe People

It’s what happens in my living room and often in the front yard, during walks to school, over Zoom, and through group texts with the writer friends who know me best. Offer vulnerability in a space where friendship runs deep, and the room forever changes, and us along with it.

Where do we start? Small. A casual story of here’s-how-God’s-at-work-in-me woven into a front yard conversation. An invitation to come inside for a cup of coffee. A choice to be interruptible.

Jennie Allen will tell you in Find Your People that it takes 200 hours to get really close. But also that you’ve just got to start. She’ll say too that “thoughtless transparency isn’t the goal, lest we make an idol out of our struggle and sin. No, we live known so that we can change and grow together” (pg. 106).

We grow best in community, through knowing and holding each other up when hope runs thin and the lies are loud in our head. But there’s another piece. As Anjuli Paschall shared in the book Come Sit With Me, it can be just as hard to join someone else in their joy as it is in their pain. “Oftentimes another person’s joy can seemingly diminish our own,” she writes (pg. 70).

Real talk means opening up about both. Inviting others to join us in the joys and sorrows, even when both leave us vulnerable. And sometimes that looks like graciously accepting a thank you.

A Prayer For The One Who Struggles to Believe She Matters

I’ll leave you with a prayer I penned in Stuff I’d Only Tell God. Whisper it with me:

Jesus, relentlessly press into the pieces of me that doubt I bring value or hold worth. Fill my ache with the fullness of Your love—which I don’t earn and can’t lose. Turn my full attention back to You when my heart gets distracted.

Just a friend over here in your corner,

Missional Neighboring 101

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