Some days, it’s easy to be grateful. The weather is beautiful. You manage to do all the jobs you need to get done. You spend time with people you love. You do activities that fill you with life. Those kinds of days, when everything seems to go right. I’m sure you know the kind of days I mean.
Then there are the more difficult days. Conversations are challenging. Work is frustrating. You end the day too drained to do much more than collapse in a heap. Those might also be the days when the toilet breaks and the milk has gone off. I’m sure we’ve all had those kinds of days too. And sometimes, we get a run of them that can be really draining, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
I mentioned before that this Lent, I’ve been trying to fit in two reflective walks each week – one on Sunday and one midweek (usually Wednesday). I have a passage and a question, and I spend some time pondering and listening to my nudges from God. It’s a practice I’ve enjoyed. Today, the passage was James 1:17:
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”
The question to provoke my thoughts was: Can I name five things I see or experience that feel like gifts from God?
When I finally sat down in the evening and read that passage and question, I couldn’t help but laugh. This morning, a queue of traffic meant I couldn’t move my car from its parking spot for a good five minutes, making me later to work than I wanted to be (though still on time). The traffic on the main roads was awful due to “overrunning roadworks,” meaning my boss wasn’t in first thing for our planning session. The internet was intermittent, impacting the jobs I was trying to get on with. By the afternoon, it dropped out completely, so no sending emails, no designing posters, no researching funders. Basically, it felt like everything was conspiring against us being able to do our jobs, and that was more than a little frustrating.
So when I read that passage and question, it felt a little like a joke. Some days, when things go well, gratitude is easy. Prayers of thanks – for situations, for friends, for opportunities – come naturally. But days like today?!
But I tried. While acknowledging that today had not been the easiest, I looked for things to be grateful for.
When I finished work, I heard birdsong, a sure sign of spring. I wish I could name each one, but even without that knowledge, there’s something beautiful about their song. At lunchtime, colleagues invited me to sit with them instead of eating on my own. Because the internet was down, I had a great conversation in the office about books and Harry Potter World over a cuppa. A friend brought me two bags of jelly babies (for my pastoral jelly baby tin). And on my gentle stroll this evening, the sunset was beautiful, a sky of calm pastel colours that brought a sense of peace after a rather unproductive and frustrating day.
There, that’s five things I am grateful for today. And actually, although the frustrations loom large, finding things to be grateful for wasn’t as hard as I had first thought when I read that passage and question. Because God does not change.
I suppose that’s the thing about gratitude; it doesn’t erase the hard moments, but it gives them perspective. Today wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t without gifts either. And maybe that’s what James was getting at: every good thing, however small, is still a gift from the unchanging God, steady even when life feels anything but.
Maybe you’ve had a day like mine—full of small frustrations, unexpected disruptions, or just a lingering sense of weariness. If so, I wonder… what five gifts might you find, even in the middle of it all?
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