The Blessing of a Grateful Heart

I hate my life.

Well, not really.

But a couple of years ago, I thought those words with a vengeance.

I live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. For a number of years, I worked for a company located about seventeen miles from my house. Every morning I joined the millions of other commuters on I-575 and I-75 for the turtle ride into work.

That seventeen-mile drive usually required about forty-five minutes to an hour. During one particularly trying period, I was logging in excess of ninety minutes going in and coming home. On several of these mornings, I sent a text to my husband saying something along the lines of, “45 MINUTES JUST TO GET TO CHASTAIN! AND YOU WONDER WHY I HATE THIS!”

Chastain Road is only six miles from my house. The every-seven-minute traffic report telling me that the road I was on was gridlocked did not help my disposition.

I am not sure what I thought I was accomplishing by yelling at my husband via text. I guess I wanted him to share my misery or maybe feel really grateful that I was sacrificing so much of my sanity to help out our family financially. I don’t know.

Smart man that he is, he never responded. He just let me complain.

My husband’s schedule does not normally require him to be on the road every day during rush hour. I am envious of his schedule, actually. He travels for three days and is then often home for a week before he goes back out. When he is home, his time is his own. So while I wasted hours slogging down the interstate at twenty-five miles per hour, he was meeting friends for breakfast or putzing around in the yard or basement on pet projects. To say I had a bad attitude about the whole thing would be an understatement.

So I complained. Loudly. And not only via text.

One evening, after I had come home spewing my typical frustrations, he said to me:

“I don’t know what you want me to do or say when you send me messages like that, so I just don’t respond. It’s like you are mad at me for not having to go through that as well. I know my schedule gets your goat. I know it bugs you that I don’t have to get up every morning and go to work. I know you are unhappy, but you are making me feel guilty for not being miserable too. I am in a good place right now, but it is getting so that I don’t want to even ask you about your day.”

Honestly, there was a teeny tiny part of me that thought, Mission accomplished!

But there was a much bigger part of me that was saddened. My husband’s words revealed what my complaining had done: caused the one I love to want to avoid me. Nice.

No one wants to be around someone who complains all the time. Well, maybe complainers like to be around other complainers because they validate each other’s complaints. For the rest of us, complainers drain the life right out of things. That is what I was doing to my husband. And frankly, my complaining was draining the life right out of me too.

The writer of Proverbs says, “It is better to live alone in the desert than with a quarrelsome, complaining wife” (v. 21:19 NLT).

Think about a desert. Hot. Arid. Dusty. Parching. Lonely. The wisdom of this verse collided with my reality. Given a choice between having a conversation with me, a complainer, and being out in a desert alone dying of thirst, my husband was better off choosing the desert.

This is not who I want to be. I want to be someone my husband looks forward to greeting every day. I want to be someone he (and everyone else in my life) desires to spend time with. I want to exude love and joy, not crabbiness.

Complaining comes from an ungrateful heart that is inwardly focused and selfish. I became so consumed by my frustration with time wasted in the car and envy over my husband’s schedule that I let my circumstances dictate my feelings, attitude, and responses. An ungrateful heart looks around and says, this is not fair.

A grateful heart, on the other hand, looks around at less than desirable circumstances and says yep, this stinks, but I will not allow this to define me or my actions. A grateful heart takes that “wasted” hour and catches up with friends, nurturing relationships. A grateful heart is blessed upon coming home to find dinner waiting because her husband was home.

I never really hated my life. I love my life and the people in it. I had just forgotten to have a grateful heart. [Tweet “Complaining robs us of joy, but a grateful heart births joy.”]

People want to be around other people who exude joy. I want to be someone who exudes joy. Don’t you?

Denise Roberts is a wife, mom, and joyful mother-in-law. She loves sharing a good cup of coffee on her back deck with friends and morning snuggles from her 100-pound chocolate lab, Hudson. She writes with a passion to share how to live holy, where faith and life intersect. Connect with her at www.deniseroberts.org.