Having a Grateful Heart

I went to a Ladies night at my church in Tomball, and they had a speaker come and share with us about her journey to having a heart of gratitude. Her name is Kristen Welch. Kristen shared the journey that God took her on to showing her that she had become ungrateful and how God changed her heart. I am reading her book “Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World”.

Let me share a quote from her book that has really rocked my world as well:

“Visiting an orphan-let home in Kenya just weeks before had turned my life upside down. That’s where I met Vincent. I will never forget standing in Vincent’s home, which was the size

of my master closet. Water dripped on my head in the dark room as he lit a candle and explained how he walked an hour to school each way and cared for his little brother because his parents were both dead. As he told us about his life, he smiled from ear to ear with joy.

“How can you be happy?” I asked as I looked around at all he didn’t have.

“I have Jesus. He is enough,” He answered confidently.

His answer was my undoing. Because I had Jesus, too, but he wasn’t enough for me. I wanted more-more money, more stuff, more to fill the emptiness.

That’s the day I started my quest for contentment and found it not in building my American Dream, but in giving it away.” (P. 47-48)

Contentment has been a struggle for me lately. I have been in a season of drought. My heart longs for my husband to have a job. We are going on five and a half months now, and it is hard not to feel like the Lord has forgotten us.

I have dreamed for 5 long years to have a home of our own, and I had it within my grasp, signed contract and everything in Alabama, and the Lord closed that door. My heart hurts. I have watched this dream die for now with no telling if it will ever return to me. And yet the Lord is asking me to place it on the alter. That is painful! Specially in a society where we feel that owning a home is owed to us.

When I look from it in a material standpoint, it does kind of feel like God has forgotten us. We don’t have an income. We don’t have a place to live right now that is our own.  So from the American dream standpoint, we are poor and forgotten.

As I have been reading this book, I have felt the Lord pushing and challenging my perspective on how we are truly not forgotten! The Lord has provided for our every need. Before all this happened, we paid off our school loans and our mini van. The Lord blessed us with a severance package so my husband could look for work. He provided in-laws who were willing to host us in their home to help us save money.  My mom has this awesome tradition called a “blessing box”. Whenever the Lord has blessed her or our family, she would put a slip of paper or a picture in there with that blessing and the date. Last night my mom pulled out her Blessing Box and began pulling out examples of how the Lord took care of us when I was a kid. I just wanted to cry. Some of them were so simple, like glasses for me, or bunk beds for the boys, but they were tangible reminders of how the Lord had provided.

God taught Israel to make monuments anywhere where something of significance happened to them that God provided for.  Joshua 4:1-7 is a great example of what God taught Israel to do to help them remember.

“ When all the people had crossed the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, ² “Now choose twelve men, one from each tribe. ³ Tell them, ‘Take twelve stones from the very place where the priests are standing in the middle of the Jordan. Carry them out and pile them up at the place where you will camp tonight.’”

⁴ So Joshua called together the twelve men he had chosen—one from each of the tribes of Israel. ⁵ He told them, “Go into the middle of the Jordan, in front of the Ark of the Lord your God. Each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder—twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. ⁶ We will use these stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ ⁷ Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.””

I want to build a memorial before the Lord. I have seen Him do some pretty hard things in us. I would call this my wondering in the desert time. But I have seen his faithfulness! I have seen Him provide for our family and bless us, not in the ways I would have expected, but He has taken care of us.

 I want to do this well. I want my kids to look back on this time and ask me what does this memorial mean? And I want to confidently tell them “This is what the Lord did for us!” I want them to remember so that some day when I am old and I see them struggling, I want to pull down my memorial box and pull out my memorials and remind them that the Lord will take care of them just as He took care of us.

Going back to the quote from the book I am reading, where the little boy says “I have Jesus. He is enough.”  Can I say that? I don’t think I can every moment of every day.  I still struggle with contentment. I am not fully there yet, but the Lord is working on me. I am so thankful that He will continue the work in me that he began at the beginning. I am his.

I love how Paul says this in Philippians 4:11-13! :

“¹¹ I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. ¹² I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. ¹³ I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

My prayer is that as the Lord stretches me and changes my heart, this verse will become me. That no matter the circumstances I will choose to be content and that would permeate through every part of me.