Saying Thanks But Not REally Thankful

Jan 2, 2009 As I said earlier I want to base a great deal of these writings on my thoughts about being thankful. I will share my own thoughts and those of Choosing Gratitude.. We can teach our young children to say the words "thank you" and yet never know what it means. I think my journey has begun in strange ways. The nature of my leukemia is such that it grows slowly yet as any who have heard the words,"you have cancer," it forever changes you. Not to say that I suddenly had so much new revelation as the fact that now I have a clock ticking in the back of my head. Sometime it ticks loudly and sometime it is barely audible but the ticking is relentless.
I think I have always been a thankful person, at least in the sense that it is not often that I have thought that my life was not fair or that others have had it better than me, (nearly everyone can say that if they want too), but I realize that I have not always been truly thankful. Thankfulness needs to be really beyond any of that. How high is thankfulness on my list of Christian virtues, often not very high. There is one area of my life that causes me a great deal of anger, frustration, and the "it's not fair" attitude and it is dragging me down to levels I don't like or even want to acknowledge. There is so much I am thankful for and yet this one personal on-going attack is enough for me to lose focus and too separate me from God's intimate grace, but what I feel causes me to sin and to justify it. I think there is only one cure for this great malady besides the grace of God Himself and that is thankfulness.... true thankfulness.