For the One Wishing Joy Was Authentic This Thanksgiving

Maybe you’re just not feeling it this year, but you’re wearing the smile anyways. You wish it could feel authentic.

I see you holding so much extra. Extra and also less, for there’s loss and disappointment and deeply-set worry scrunching lines in your brow. It’s a lot under the weight of amplified expectations and hold-your-breath prayers and silent wishes that everyone could at least pretend to be happy.

Joy seems like a novel idea. If only it could be produced with decor and Thanksgiving fixings. If only it didn’t feel fair-weathered and immensely fragile.

But maybe the fractures and fault lines build something better. What if joy, like a broken piece of Japanese pottery, can be melded with liquid gold? Perhaps joy is equally delicate and resilient–and more beautiful because it’s both?

Joy Takes Practice

Last week I read a line that has me thinking a lot about joy. “Joy is not a delicacy that only healthy, rested, together people get,” wrote Dr. Merideth Hite Estevez in The Artist’s Joy. 

There’s no magic formula for joy, no precariously specific combination of correct ingredients, no trapeze balancing skill required. It’s not just available sometimes or under ideal conditions. 

But like most of the best things, it requires practice.

Practice looking for the gift in the ordinary and still-being redeemed.

Practice saying thanks for the untimely and unsightly gifts–while trusting we don’t have the full picture yet.

Practice coming to the page and adding another line of gratitude, even when you don’t say it quite right or misspell a word or missed yesterday.

Merideth says it of practicing music, but it’s also true of practicing gratitude: “It’s the repetition, the showing up, that makes it holy and life-giving.” 

Searching for “Grace Gold”

I have to wonder how much capacity for joy we would grow if we saw Thanksgiving as the beginning, not the end, of our thankfulness journey. A 30-day challenge as a kickstart, not a finish line. Maybe gratitude was never meant to be a month-long sprint, but a marathon.

There’s a shift in our approach when we’re in it for the long stretch. Just as we expect there to be blisters and sore muscles, setbacks and recovery when preparing to traverse 26.2 miles on foot, so too can we expect our gratitude marathon to be messy.

But as we commit to search for “grace gold” as my friend Jennifer Sakata often says, we’ll find it binds the hurts and hard with hope. Just like gold can fuse a shattered piece of pottery, so can gratitude turn the muchness weighing you down into pure, inextinguishable joy. 

Beginning–Because It All Matters

Where do we start?

At number one, where all things begin. We record the first, imperfect thanks that comes to mind. Then line by line, we keep listing:

• Early morning silence like an open canvas
• Birdsong through cracked window
• Pumpkin pancakes filling tummies
• An evening in the front yard with neighbor-friends
• Your face, Your grace, Your with-me presence
• Best-yet batch of sourdough
• A loud truck going gently up the hill
• Another gratitude story in my inbox

We write through smudges and corrected spellings and small thanks that feel insignificant. 

Because it all matters. All the seeking for gift in the middle and mundane and downright awful. All the showing up with poised pen and expectation. All the dedication to write it down even when you can barely make the time.

The quiet commitment to name grace daily sets the habit. And that habit lifts us on the heavy days, slows us on the hurried days, and wells joy on the dry days. 

Joy Catches On

We come first as beginners, feeling out a new practice, with all the awkwardness of an amateur. We pick up a pen and break the silence of a blank page by writing #1.

Soon the joy will catch on, and you’ll look giddy for gifts in the most unlikely places. You’ll tell God thanks out loud when there’s break enough in traffic to make a left out of your neighborhood. In time, you’ll learn to keep your gratitude journal close when you read your Bible because you often uncover nuggets about God’s nature. More thanks.

As your list lengthens, it will spill into new journals with fresh, blank pages. And you’ll remember writing the first line and wish you knew then that someday you’d have a towering stack of gratitude-lined journals and no thought of ever stopping.

The Secret to Joy

Maybe it’s the way gratitude turns us towards Jesus, who is always turned towards us, that has me breathless. As Ann Voskamp writes in Gifts & Gratitudes, “Giving thanks is an awakening to life–the breath of God upon the face, warm and close.” What joy to be loved with such warmth and tenderness! What a gift to have God with us in every moment, not just the ones with obvious good?

And yet, she pauses at a verse that lends an unexpected secret: 

Twice Paul whispered it: “I have learned” (Philippians 4:11-12, NLT). Learned. I would have to learn eucharisteo. You need to learn it to live it fully. Learn how to be thankful, whether empty or full, There it is–the secret to living joy in every situation is the full life of eucharisteo.

Joy for now. Joy for the Thanksgiving table. Joy for the days after–for Advent and ordinary Februaries and the first stirrings of spring. And the gateway is gratitude.

As Thanksgiving comes and goes and the #ReflectJesus challenge ends, I pray your joy doesn’t diminish. Actually, I envision increase. Gratitude-grounded joy drenching you like playful waves splashing against the shore.

Let’s pray.

Jesus, what a gift that joy isn’t dependent on circumstance, deterred by hardship, or dissolved by the mundane. I offer You my extra and my less, each like a fragment of pottery once whole. Piece me back together and glue the edges with my gratitude. 

Just a friend over here in your corner,

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