Notes for Talk
Crown Point Ward, November 2008
Thanks a lot. We’ve heard lots of good messages about gratitude so far today, and of course, the Thanksgiving-themed meeting concludes with yet another talk on gratitude. I’d meant to share a few stories about gratitude, but as I look over my notes I realize that most of my stories deal in one way or another with ingratitude. Just as in the New Testament, where the nine examples of ingratitude who turn their backs on Christ contrast with the single grateful recipient of His grace [Luke 17:17], any bad examples are meant to make us shake our heads and say, “I hope I’m not that ungrateful.” Essentially these stories are meant to instill gratitude in us by giving us blatant examples of the opposite to throw darts at. Maybe I could instill a bit of gratitude in each of you by cutting things short and giving you all an extra fifteen minutes of recess before Sunday School. But I’m guessing in that event the bishopric would fill in the time with a testimony or two; so if extra recess time isn’t on the agenda, I guess I might as well finish the job.
The Big Three. Speaking of recess, I thought I’d share a story about a recess gone wrong over twenty five years ago. I was eleven, part way through sixth grade. I didn’t quite fit in, having just moved to a new school after spending six years in Germany. I was just beginning to think that girls might be interesting enough to try to impress. But their attention seemed to be focused on the boys who were playing football, basketball, or baseball. Unfortunately the only sport I had played in Germany was soccer, a completely obscure sport in the Midwest if there ever was one; I gave the strange new American sports a shot for about a day each at recess. The weird-shaped, oblong pigskin ball went end over end every time I threw it, I heard shouts of “airball!” every time I tried to launch the basketball toward a hoop twice my height, and I couldn’t get a single baseball to stay in the oversize oven mitt on my hand. The kind of attention I attracted trying to play those sports was not the kind I wanted.
Big Fish. So I retreated back to the monkey bars with the younger kids. If I couldn’t swim in the big pond, I figured I’d at least try to stand out in the little pond. So I’d try different things to make the third and fourth-graders ooh and aah, like seeing how far I could jump and still catch myself on the monkey bars. I got farther and farther away each time, and the kids started to talk, “Wow, did you see that? He jumped clear from the other end of the jungle gym and caught the monkey bars!” What did President Hinckley say, “Adulation is poison?” Well, it wasn’t enough for me; I started devising a plan that would really blow them away, maybe even send repercussions all the way to the adoring soon-to-be cheerleaders on the sidelines of the football field. There were two playsets next to each other with quite a bit of space between them. I kept staring at the higher of the two, trying to figure out if it would be possible to jump all the way from there to the lower one. If I were to climb clear to the top and jump as far as I could, I might just barely be able to catch myself. It was only a couple of feet farther than I had already jumped, and as I graphed it out in my mind, I decided I there was a good chance I could make it. On the off chance I failed, though, I’d pancake all over the hard-packed layer of barkchips. I really didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I decided to try it without an audience first. The next morning, I went out before school to give it a test run. I climbed up on the one set as high as I could and stared at the void between me and the other set. It must have been about twenty feet if my memory is correct (rest assured, it’s not). I just stood there staring at the bar opposite me and then the school bell rang. I had to get back inside, so it was now or never. After swallowing my doubts in one big gulp, I launched off the structure as hard as I could, stretching my arms out as far as they’d go.
Up…and Down. I caught the bar solidly and had a split second of elation, picturing how from that day forward my secret crush Mandi would ditch the football field to cheer me on from the sidelines of the playset, calling all of her friends over just to see me try my next feat. But as I swung through, I realized I had made a gross miscalculation. Though I had been through it a hundred times in my head and thought I had all the physics worked out, I had left out one very important variable. The dew point temperature! Sure enough, the morning’s ambient temperature was well below that critical threshold, and the bar was dripping with dew. And so, right at the top of my swing, my fingers peeled away from the bar and I did a full one and a half back somersault. All I remember was a big crunch and then staring up at a clear, blue sky. I can’t remember which I realized first: that I had knocked the wind out of myself or that I couldn’t move my arm. In any case, my ego had taken a huge blow. I stood up, looked around to make sure nobody had seen me, and carried my arm toward the school, cradled like a baby. I hoped to just slide into my seat without anybody noticing. But when I got to the classroom door, I realized I couldn’t even feel my arm. I figured something must have been drastically wrong, so going back to class wasn’t going to be an option. I kept on walking right past the classroom without turning my head, wandered into the principal’s office, and shyly told them I might have hurt my arm a little. The nurse took one look at it, poked me in the shoulder, and cringed. “You need to get to a hospital right away. Ambulance or mother?” Neither option sounded particularly appealing. But the thought of all eyes in the school glued to the classroom window as the ambulance hauled me off prompted a decisive “Mom!”
Unhumorous. So they got my mom to come pick me up and take me to the ER where a nurse set me up for some very painful x-rays. The feeling was starting to return along with a whole lot of throbbing by the time the doctor came to the room with a stern look. He cracked a smile as he started to speak, “You may not find this humorous, but you’ve broken your humerus!” He was right. I didn’t find his joke the least bit humorous. Turned out I had popped my shoulder out of socket and broke the humerus bone just below the joint. They knocked me out, reset the bone, and wrapped my arm to my body. Because of the nature of the break, they couldn’t put a cast on it. So I had a couple of weeks lying in bed, sitting up, getting in touch with my inner pain.
Focus. One night my dad came into my room to ask how things were going. I was miserable and didn’t want to talk much. But he wanted to say something to help me feel better. “Let me tell you a story about when I shredded my knee ligaments in a skydiving accident,” he said, “when I’d say my prayers, I’d kneel on my good leg, with the other one stuck in a case, pointing straight behind me, and I’d tell the Lord how thankful I was for the one knee I still had to kneel on. Then I’d go through each part of my body that did work and say thanks for that.” I nodded, but it was not the advice I wanted. I wanted to be mad, not grateful. It’s a preteen thing, I think, just wanting to be upset about things, no matter what anybody says. Later on, I tried his trick in solitude. It didn’t work for me in the least. The harder I tried to think about the parts that did work, the more my arm seemed to hurt. My wife knows I don’t deal well with acute pain, because I tend to focus on it and just can’t seem to think about anything else.
Diversion. In the middle of all of this, I did find one thing to be thankful for. Thanks to cutting edge technology, Sony had just shrunk a cassette player into this compact little form that they were calling a “Walkman.” My gadget-freak dad, always interested in the latest gizmo, couldn’t resist and brought one home. He let me borrow it, provided I listened to “uplifting” music. He brought me a stack of classical and religious tapes. I set them aside and dug out the one cassette tape I had to my name: a K-Tel tape with the Eye of the Tiger – my favorite song at the time – and a bunch of other early eighties classics. At least now, on top of my own anger, I had some noise to drown out the pain. Now that was something I could be grateful for. I listened to that tape, with the volume cranked up, over and over and over…to this day any song off that tape still makes me wince in memory of the pain; eventually the pain subsided and it was time to go back to school. I dreaded that first day back. Maybe I could tell everyone I had broken my arm playing football or something cool like that. But as soon as I got to school, I found out the real story had already spread around.
Advice. I guess an underlying theme of this particular tale is "be careful what you ask for." If I had been asking for attention, I got it, so I guess my prayers were answered in a way. Mandi did finally give me the time of day. Unfortunately it was in the form of the semi-sympathetic look that you’d give a dumb dog that got pegged after chasing a car. One of those, “too bad, but serves you right for being a doofus” looks. In the long run, I think the whole situation did teach me a bit of gratitude on top of the compulsory humility. Because whether or not I took my dad’s advice to heart at the time, I still remember his advice. Now that my body has aged and things aren’t working quite as well as they used to, I think I do finally appreciate the parts that do work. They’re getting to be fewer and fewer, so that makes them easier to focus on. And maybe when I get really old and there’s only a single working part versus a hundred non-functional parts, that lesson will fully sink in and I’ll be able to focus on that part with genuine gratitude.
Broken Hearted. We all know that it only takes one non-functioning part to dominate our lives. Because of the thousands of processes that have to go perfectly while a baby is developing during pregnancy, it’s still a miracle even when one part somehow fails to develop as it should. It will be ten years ago next week that a surgeon closed the door of a small consultation room, sat us down, and told us the chance that our newborn son would make it through a series of open heart procedures was a essentially a coin toss. Sitting in our life of comfort, I had always wondered how people handle the trauma of war, especially when families are torn apart. The way this news stunned me, this may as well have been wartime. It was like somebody standing there with your child playing Russian roulette. Three bullets in a six-gun. Spinning the barrel and making you watch. But foregoing the operations would have added the other three bullets; the chance of losing him would be certain, so surgery was our only choice. The first operation and subsequent recovery period was traumatic, but a few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, we finally got the green light to bring him home.
Survivor’s Guilt. Although our friends and family would make comments that seemed consolatory or sympathetic in light of the challenge we were facing, the experience had given us quite the opposite reaction. Although it was wonderful to bring him home, it left us with a kind of survivor’s guilt. You wonder what makes you so stinking special. We had just spent a few weeks at a children’s hospital that grouped four kids in each recovery room. So after Jaedin’s operation we sat there with three other sets of parents whose kids had likewise come out of surgery. One little boy had a severe case of brittle bones syndrome and screamed constantly from the pain. I’m convinced that sound could drive a sane person mad quicker than any other sound on earth; the fortitude of those parents who had endured it for years amazed us. The boy had broken almost every bone in his body at one point or another, sometimes just from coughing or from writhing in pain in his crib. At best they were giving him another year to live, a year in which each day was sure to get worse than the previous. When I think back to how much complaining I did over a single broken bone, it’s not just embarrassing, it’s downright humiliating. Another little girl in our recovery room had been born with no outlets in her lower half and had to have all of them formed surgically. The implications to her future development and opportunities frequently had her parents in tears. The third child came in brain dead after choking on a marshmallow at home. Her parents ended up making the painful decision to take her off of life support. Those weeks were more emotionally draining than anything we could have imagined. It was a relief to leave, but you can see why it was bittersweet at the same time. You take a strange new perspective on things when you walk out of a children’s hospital with your child, because when you go, you realize that so many of the people who are still there would give anything to trade places with you. Some of them, when they finally do walk out those doors for the last time, won’t have their child in their arms.
Gratitometer. What surprised me most about that experience was the palpable sense of gratitude that could be found in that recovery room. If you made yourself a gratitometer and took a reading right there among those who were suffering deeply, you’d probably get a higher reading than if you took a measurement among perfectly healthy people down at Gold’s Gym, in my downtown office, or in the high school cafeteria across the street. Yes, it’s human nature to forget to be thankful when we’re only exposed to people who from all outward appearances seem to be happier or better off than we are. But the saving grace of humanity is that it’s also human nature, when we interact personally with someone who is suffering, to feel charity, the true love of Christ. With that light, our eyes are opened and we see that we’re all in the same boat together. That is when weighing out who might have the worst challenge stops mattering altogether because we see that we all have our unique challenges, and we all need the Comforter to overcome them. How many people, after sharing a story about depression, miscarriage, addiction, debt, or some other deeply personal event involving suffering, have found that even though they thought they were all alone, all the sudden other people start opening up about their own experiences? And then you might find that maybe you were comparing your own situation to some imaginary ideal, measuring yourself against people who were pretending to be better off or happier than they really were.
Back Again? If you could flip the dial on the gratitometer and measure the depth of suffering a person had encountered, you’d probably find the two variables varying together. Sure, a suffering person could say, “woe is me”. It seems completely understandable to those faced with lesser suffering, just like Job’s wife thought he might as well “curse God and die” [Job 2:9]. The key is that comparisons get you nowhere and that any true comparison brings out more gratitude if you keep your eyes open. Let’s think about the people in the Childrens Hospital who seemed to be facing greater challenges than we were. We’d go back for another surgery every six months. Each time we’d see people we knew, and we’d say, “oh, you’re back again too?” And some of them would answer, “well, we never left.” So what could they possibly be grateful for?
Dried Up. Well that was really drilled into my head by a volley of e-mails that came my way. After finding out how little was known about Jaedin’s heart condition at the time, I set up a website with some links and background information. I immediately started getting e-mails from all around the world. Let me just share one of those with you. It came from a couple in China who had just found out their newborn had the same heart condition as Jaedin. Although their doctor knew enough about the condition to diagnose it, he could not offer them any treatment at his hospital. Turned out not a single facility serving the Chinese population of a billion plus could offer any treatment, either. So these parents frantically went to an internet café and tried to search for options. Keep in mind the condition, without surgical intervention, is almost 100% fatal within a week. In their internet search, they ran across a website offering them some hope. Mine. I knew full well that most other countries couldn’t treat the condition, but I also knew of charities that specialized in bringing children with congenital heart defects to the United States for treatment. So I had included links to these charities on the website. But when these parents clicked on them, the links were broken. So they wrote me an e-mail and asked if I had any updated information on the charities. I knew they were in the worst kind of time crunch so I stayed up late trying to find out how to contact the charities directly. After a bit of research, I came to the sad realization that the charities had folded, one by one. During the dot-com boom, lots of people were feeling generous, and these charities were well funded. But things had tanked in the meantime, and their funding had dried up; they had closed up shop.
Dear Oprah. Now what was I going to write to this poor family in China? I tried to be as positive as I could in my reply, but the reality was that their baby probably wouldn’t live past that week. I asked them to share some more details about their situation and offered to pass the information along to newspapers, magazines, even Oprah herself, in order to publicize their story and beg other organizations for help. I never got a reply back. But even if you did end up raising the quarter million dollars it would take to fly that one baby here for an operation, you’d probably find that the same amount of money could have saved a hundred or maybe a thousand kids facing starvation, AIDS, or whatever else afflicts the rest of the third world. Is that where you would put the money? What would you tell these parents? I come home at night and play with my kids while others facing the same problem as Jaedin have no chance… So what can I do about it? I don’t have the slightest answer. But one thing I do know is that ingratitude and complaining on my part can’t fit anywhere inside that picture, no matter how tough things might get.
God Bless America. The people we ran across at the Childrens Hospital in most cases understood this reality. Even the parents of the boy with brittle bones. They were grateful. Why? Because you know what, at least they were getting treatment, at least they were given a chance. Our health care system may have its down sides, but somehow, they ended up with a team of doctors and nurses trying their absolute hardest to save these kids. For Jaedin’s case, nowhere else on the planet did a health care system exist that provided enough research funding to have found an intervention. Now in the meantime, the procedures that were developed here in the United States have been exported and other countries are able to build on our forays and save these babies, too. Of all the things that being out patriotic feelings in me, this one trumps them all. Living in a land of opportunity takes on a whole new meantime to us, something I can not take for granted after reading so many of these grueling e-mails from overseas.
Down Side. Lucky as we are, we don’t necessarily show gratitude for the benefits of life in America; in fact, in our complaining, we don’t even often even show gratitude for the right to voice dissent in the first place. We all know our system comes with a price, and given the number of uninsured and some of the other inadequacies of our health care system, it is understandable that not everyone feels grateful. In Jaedin’s case, I’m grateful that we have been recipients of someone else’s research, but we happen to have won the coin toss, and you have to take the good with the bad. Because of the experimental nature of things, the surgeons who developed the procedures that saved Jaedin’s life were eventually barred from medical practice by malpractice suits. I can’t judge the people who sued. If we had lost Jaedin in the process, maybe we would have come out bitter, lashing out at the system and the surgeons. But ingratitude on our part, after having witnessed a miracle, would be inexcusable.
CIPA. As we encounter pain and suffering in our own lives, we become more aware of pain and suffering in the world around us. So it is understandable that many of our prayers are centered around alleviating pain and suffering. But do we know what we’re asking for? There is a rare medical condition where you don’t feel pain. It’s called CIPA, Congenital Insensitivity to Pain And it’s one of the worst things that could happen to a person. Typically people with the condition don’t live beyond about three years of age. Without the signals that trigger intervention, victims of the disease will walk around on broken bones, develop infections, burn themselves, bite their tongues, or experience any number of traumas that anyone with children knows to be part of the daily routine of life. But these kids won’t realize what happened, won’t seek medical care. And by the time visible symptoms become apparent, it’s often too late. If a parent of a CIPA child heard one of us complaining about pain, or praying to have pain lifted, they would want us to understand that they are begging for just the opposite.
Opposition. The same holds for suffering. Sure, Christ Himself relieved pain and suffering by healing and comforting. But if the people He healed and comforted had never suffered to begin with, the lessons would have been lost. Why do we stand in need a Comforter? We have to have something that makes us stand in need of comfort to appreciate that role. Though we want to be comforted from our suffering once encountered, avoiding the whole process altogether would defeat one of the purposes of this life. We know God set this world up with opposition in all things, and along those lines, deep sorrow gives us capacity for great joy, and vice versa. Having children brought us joy, but at no point in my life before I had kids would I have ever had the capacity to hurt as much as I did they wheeled Jaedin off to the OR. Before having kids, there probably isn’t anything anyone could have said to make me feel something as deeply as when the surgeon came out of the OR and sat us down to tell us whether the operation had been successful. I was praying as hard as I could not to be confronted with what might have been the most sorrowful thing a parent can experience. By asking for our sorrow to be limited, though, we may be asking for our joy to be limited. Our first parents recognized this and consciously entered into the bargain of life that we may know good from evil and experience joy – perhaps proportional to our sorrow. When we pray to prevent pain, sorrow, or suffering, we are essentially asking the Lord to take us back to the Garden of Eden. And if we’re not careful, some of our wishes for others around us, if granted, would take us all the way back to Satan’s plan. All that effort to get us here, and we want to go back? Of course we’re expected to turn to God in our suffering, but the fine line is gratitude. Feeling and expressing gratitude for the situation, strange as that sounds, will go a long way toward opening our eyes and our hearts to His grace.
Subway. Our physical bodies give us plenty of challenges to a gracious character. How many people are actually happy with their bodies? If you took a poll and asked everyone who they wanted to look like, people who consider themselves overweight may point to someone they think is ideal. But ask that “ideal” person, and maybe they, in turn, think they’re too skinny, too tall, or whatever. Even if we get our bodies to a point where we’re happy with them, it’s easy to find something else to complain about. Sometimes we get in the habit of complaining, and it’s a tough one to break, even if it’s absurd. Picture yourself walking through a department store. You see someone at the checkout stand complaining about having to spend money to buy a new pair of pants. And as he walks away you see it’s that Subway guy Jared who doesn’t fit in his huge pants anymore because he lost so much weight. It seems ludicrous, but how often do we complain about a situation, pray for the motivation to do something about it, and then move on to another complaint once our prayers are answered.
Yes Honey. I found myself doing just that recently. A few years back, I decided I needed a change at work. So I interviewed all over the place and came out of the process with exactly zero job offers. I felt a bit stuck, so I complained about the situation to my wife. Well a few months back, things seemed to have turned around a bit in my industry, so I gave it a shot again. And this time, what do you know, there were a few opportunities to choose from. So what did I do? I complained about the situation to my wife. Complained about the stress, the timing of the offers, the internal tug of war, how complex these decisions become once you’ve got a whole family to worry about. I’m grateful for Lindy’s companionship and the perspective she adds to my life: in this case in particular, she helped me see things in a different light. As wives often do, she brought me back to earth. “Isn’t this exactly what you were asking for last time around? Opportunities? Now you’ve got what you wanted, so why not be happy about it?” So with my tail between my legs, I said, “yes, honey” and hopefully have become better able to see things with the added perspective of gratitude.
Wall Street. It’s a tough thing to do – to sit back and be grateful for what you’ve got. Society, particularly when influenced by capitalism, tends to teach us just the opposite. Don’t sit back and look at what you’ve got – look at what you could get! That’s a big part of what got us into this financial mess we keep hearing about on the news to begin with. From the individual homeowner in over his head to the corporations that have to project growth to survive, the messages around us send us signals in which gratitude plays no part. If you’re a publicly traded company, you can’t sit back and be happy with your place in the market. What if your annual report to shareholders said, “let’s just be grateful for what we have.” The shareholders would pound you! If your business plan was to maintain your market share and you were to say, “these are my customers, I like them and they like me, so I’m going to stick with this market share and focus on making them happy.” You’d get slaughtered on Wall Street! If your predictions for next year were to assume the same number of customers as this year with no increase, your shareholders would drop you in favor of someone who promises to expand exponentially, whether or not it’s actually a sustainable or even reasonable prediction.
Gas Pump. And now we see those effects. The headlines are full of news about a global economic downturn, a crisis that seems to be spiraling out of control. Let’s back up a few months, though, and listen in on some prayers. Faced with rising gas costs, families wanting to take road trips, business owners with fleets of trucks, and lots of other people were praying for the price of gas to come down. Well it did. Here we sit a few months later with the answer to those prayers. But you don’t hear much appreciation for that, you hear that the economy is in shambles. Well that’s what it takes to get oil prices down – increased supply or reduced demand. The supply isn’t going to get much bigger anytime soon, so a slowing economy is the only way we’ll see the significant reduction in demand required to bring about lower gas prices. When gas prices were high, the economy was booming. Demand was up, so there you go. But how many people a few months back expressed their gratitude that the economy was doing so well? Nope, we were murmuring at the gas pump when all we were observing was an effect of a growing economy. So can we find something to be grateful for among the mess we’re in? Well, in addition to lower gas prices, I’m reminded every day that it’s actually an answer to a whole lot of other prayers. I’m in the environmental consulting field, which has long been a proponent of reducing consumption. Well here we are consuming less. Perhaps by force rather than by choice, but it’s effective nonetheless, and we need to keep in mind that we may be observing an answer to one set of prayers that, in turn, will spawn a whole new set of prayers from those whose livelihoods rely on consumption.
Daily Trouble. Our Father must shake his head at us an occasion. Does He ever think to Himself, “I just can’t win with these people”? I think we get the chance to briefly glimpse how He might feels as we try to raise children with a grateful heart. I could list a hundred times where I thought our kids should appreciate something more than they did, but then every once in a while you see them offer thanks for something that you completely overlooked and you get the sense that maybe, somehow, it’s sinking in. In that way, I believe parenthood to be preparatory to godhood. But in the meantime, here we sit…every day we deal with concerns about health, weight, income, pride on the playground, or things at the office. We need to realize that the very things that cause us stress are precisely the things we need to appreciate God’s grace. Sometimes it takes peeling some things away, and then we find, in living simply, shed of our “stuff”, we may gain greater appreciation for what really counts. Our Savior understands the daily stresses we face. One of my favorite scriptures, (though I’ll deviate a bit from the King James translation here), is where Christ tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that “each day has trouble enough of it’s own.” [Matthew 6:32-34]. We’re counseled in those same verses that if we seek first the Kingdom of God, in the end we’ll find that things will take care of themselves, and that we don’t need to worry so much about tomorrow. I’m grateful for my wonderful family, for my two boys who stood in white just last week and promised the Lord they’d join His team, for the countless blessings we receive on a daily basis. I believe that if we can somehow manage to be thankful for what we have today, we’ll be better able to appreciate what comes our way tomorrow. And He has told us that He has unimaginable gifts in store for us, including something as seemingly simple as His forgiveness, if we would but receive them with gratitude.