Everyone agrees gratitude is a wonderful thing. We know it when we see it.We appreciate it when someone extends it in our direction. We miss it when it’s gone. We resent the absence of it in our children and co-workers.

What we have trouble with is nailing that sucker down.

What exactly is thankfulness (gratitude, an appreciative spirit, etc.)? Several sermons on the subject in my library dance all around the subject, blaming it on this, attributing it to that, everything but identifying what exactly it is.

What follows will not be the final word on this subject. You knew this, but I wanted to make sure everyone knows that I’m aware of it too.

As the expression goes about art, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.” Seems to me a justice once said that about pornography. No doubt, it applies to a wide assortment of subjects, including gratitude.

Here is one snapshot of thankfulness.

To be candid with you, I have drifted in and out of this attitude of gratitude in years past. But it’s all different now in my life. Every day is a gift. Every moment is a precious treasure. If you haven’t been through something like cancer, you can’t know what I’m talking about. –David Jeremiah, “God in You,” p. 105.

I’ve had cancer. Twice.  Surgery twice. Once in 2004 and again in 2021.

Cancer on the tongue.  Yes, the tongue.  If you want to hurt a Baptist preacher, that’s the place! (I went through radiation and chemo, and at the age of 85, they say I’m cancer free.)

I’m grateful.

Here are the four elements of my gratitude, and perhaps of yours.

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In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.  –First Thessalonians 5:18

The leaders of this country knew something, something vital about people.  If they are not led to do otherwise, people will gripe and complain and insist on their rights.

It’s human nature. Ask any pastor.  Ask any school principal.  Ask any parent.

Ask our political leaders.

And when people gripe and complain, the infection spreads like wildfire and does just as much damage.

Firefighters know the way to head off a big fire is to light a backfire.

My uncle was a forest ranger in Bankhead National Forest in north Alabama.  When I was 15, he hired me to help him for part of the summer.  Two dollars a day it was!  Not much, but it was two dollars more than this farm boy was making!

I still recall him saying, “Joe, do you know how to set a backfire?”  I had no clue.  He showed me.  The fire was up ahead and coming this way.  But Uncle Cecil and I walked around setting small fires that we let burn a few minutes, then extinguished.  Then, when the fire arrived, its fuel was all gone, all burned out.  And the fire died.

That’s how it is with griping and complaining, with grumbling and insisting on our rights. The way to douse that conflagration is by getting ahead of it and setting a backfire of thanksgiving.

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It is said that when Maureen Stapleton won the Academy Award, she gushed into the microphone, “I want to thank everyone I’ve ever known!”

That got a laugh, I’m sure, and everyone understood the sense of gratitude that threatened to overload her nervous system. It’s a grand feeling, no doubt, although few among us have ever been in the position she was at that moment.

But does anyone think that Ms. Stapleton’s friends and family members, her co-stars and colleagues, her producers and directors, immediately felt appreciated and properly thanked by that statement? Surely not. No one took it as a personal word of appreciation.

Impersonal, general, generic one-size-fits-all thanks does not do the job. A message on the sign-board in front of a place of business saying “Thanks for your patronage” does not communicate thanksgiving.

There are ways to say “thanks” effectively and also ways to say “thanks” when you’re wasting your breath.

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In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.  –First Thessalonians 5:18

Were not ten lepers healed?  And yet only one turned back to give thanks.  –Luke 17:11-19

“Thank you” may not be the most profound thing you will hear or speak today. The person you direct those words to–let’s be honest–will not find them the most rewarding of utterances they receive throughout the day. In our society, they’re rather routine.

However, and this is what keeps us coming back to reminding ourselves to give thanks, the absence of those two words creates a deafening silence that may wound good people who have served well.

Thanksgiving can be trite or it can be a treasure. How we give it, the way we speak it, the smile on our countenance, and the sincerity in our voice, these infuse it with authenticity or diminish its worth.

Though I have the gift of eloquence and can move great audiences with the force of my words and have not thanks, I am become a self-righteous prig and an insufferable elitist.

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