c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Every year around Thanksgiving I recall a weekend in 1967 when I learned about thanklessness the hard way.

I was involved in a musical performance that included a song about gratefulness. The leader asked me to share something about being thankful.

It was the weekend before finals, I was way behind on my studies and the last place I wanted to be was on that stage, and the last thing I felt like doing was faking gratefulness.

“I’ve got nothing to be thankful for,” I responded.

The next day, I was involved in a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Traveling 65 mph, I tumbled head over heels without a helmet. My face was shredded, the flesh torn back to the jawbone. Amazingly, the first person to stop was a physician who sized up my injuries, put me in the back seat of his car and rushed me directly to the emergency room at the nearest hospital.

As I faded in and out of consciousness on the operating table, all I could think about was my friends in Vietnam suffering equally devastating injuries but without immediate medical attention. I visualized one of them lying in a rice paddy with his face half blown off with no help in sight.

I tried to piece together the accident in my head while the surgeon cleaned out my wounds and stitched my face back together. Through the fog I could hear him saying something to me: “Young man, you’ve got a lot to be thankful for.”

G.K. Chesterton once said, “The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.” In my mind, the paraphrase came out something like, “The worst thing for a person who believes in God is to be blessed and not give thanks.”

Since that incident, I have tried to find some reason for thankfulness each day, even in the worst of times.

Jesus left an example of that mindset. In the Gospels we read, “Jesus, in the night in which he was betrayed, broke bread, and when he had given thanks, gave it to the disciples.”

St. Paul carried on the tradition and indicated that the best way to overcome anxiety is to stop worrying and start praying. “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds.”

Anybody following the news knows we are in tough times nationally and globally _ and things are likely to get worse before they get better. Your personal situation may leave you feeling like I did those many years ago: “I’ve got nothing to be thankful for.”

Our Founding Fathers knew something about tough times, yet in 1777, Samuel Adams sponsored a resolution in the Continental Congress that declared a day of Thanksgiving. “It is therefore recommended … to set apart Thursday the eighteenth day of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise, that with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor.”

This was before Hallmark and before someone “discovered” the inappropriateness of mixing governmental proclamations with the idea of a “divine benefactor.” Evidently Adams didn’t get the memo.

The fact is giving thanks _ individually and as a nation _ is serious business and requires attentiveness to the good things happening in your life. When you’re in a rough patch, just the discipline of identifying something good in your otherwise gloomy circumstances can lift your spirits.

I close with a reminder from Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who understood all too well the possibility of thanksgiving in impossibly difficult times. To be happy while hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust seems an unlikely proposition, but there in her diaries we read, “I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy.”

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

KRE/DEA END STAUB

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