Gratitude

June 6, 2008

“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.” - Karl Barth

I am lying in (my own!) bed this morning with tears of joy trickling into the coffee. I have never been so grateful--simply, truly, humbly grateful--for anything as much as I am for the river of love that just keeps on flowing over my family and me. I’ve been out of the flow for a little bit, and it stunned me this morning to read all the emails, messages, and cards that have accumulated. In a world unfortunately full of tragedy, ugliness, anger, and self-serving, receiving such gifts of compassionate selflessness is like opening the best present on the best Christmas morning. My hope is renewed....my heart unshrivels.

The weight of our reality is already so heavy that the smallest thing added to it can plunge me 20,000 leagues under the sea. But just as I’m about to drown in the dark, ugly waters, I receive a tank full of life-restoring oxygen from letters such as the one I just opened from someone I don’t think I’ve even met. Her daughter was a sorority sister of Katherine’s at Samford. She writes, “...I have cried with you many times. The body of Christ is truly that--when the finger hurts, the whole body feels the pain. The pain we feels draws us to our knees--both day and night--lifting each of you in prayer.” Someone I don’t even know is down on her knees for me!

Friends, the world just doesn’t get this. If we’re honest, I think we’ll acknowledge that the fleshly inner reaction is more like, “Well, that’s sad, but I’m just glad it wasn’t my child.” But I have received such an outpouring of empathy that it almost feels as if Katherine has a thousand mothers instead of just measly old me. My love and concern for her are being infinitely multiplied and magnified. My prayers for her are carried straight to the Father's throne on the wings of the prayers of countless other compassionate mothers.

I am profoundly grateful for this. I am grateful for your love, your concern, your support. I am grateful for your notes, messages, books, gifts, food, and flowers. I am grateful for your faithfulness. I am grateful for your shoulders. I am grateful for your tears. But most of all, I am grateful for your prayers.

“Thank you” just doesn’t cut it. We’ll have to come up with a new word.

In the meantime..... thank you.

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No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

John Donne, from Meditation XVII