Making Time for Gratitude

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. (Colossians 3:16 NIV)

I love the concept of gratitude. An attitude of gratitude can often be the beginning of so many fruits of the Spirit, such as kindness, joy, and patience. No matter our circumstances, we can always find something for which we can be grateful. However, a key piece of the puzzle in finding those things is ensuring we have time—margin—to notice them.

Gratitude and Our Thoughts

As we enter the holiday season, time can be at a premium. Noticing what we should be grateful for in our lives has to start with our headspace.

In our culture, information is coming at us faster than we can take it in. It can be overwhelming. I believe we all must find ways to clear our minds, allow room for God, and express our gratitude to him.

Some of you may start your mornings with a quiet time. I admire you as that has never been a discipline I’ve connected with. I prefer to pray throughout the day, and I read and study at different times throughout the week as I’m able. You should feel the freedom to find what works for you. Maybe it’s using the Calm app to center your mind at lunch every day. Maybe it’s taking a bath or a shower and dedicating your thoughts during that time to gratitude.

Regardless of your method, you can’t have a grateful heart if you don’t give your mind room to ponder the subject.

Gratitude and Our Calendars

Another significant factor in ensuring we live our lives with gratefulness is how we spend our time. We all have the same twenty-four hours a day to work with, and that in itself is a gift we can be grateful for. If you find yourself looking at the next few weeks with fear or apprehension when it comes to getting everything done, ask yourself when was the last time you took your calendar to our heavenly Father and submitted it to him.

Many preachers talk about how we should submit our bank accounts to God and ensure the way we spend our money aligns with our values. I don’t disagree, and I suggest doing the same with our calendars is just as important. What doesn’t align with the passions God has given you? What doesn’t align with the way you want to spend time with your family? How is God convicting you in this area?

Before school started this year, we attended an open house at my eighth grader’s middle school. A table for an afterschool club focused on leadership and community service. I mentioned it to my husband and my daughter, and their first reaction was to say Ellie wouldn’t have time because of her honors classes.

I wasn’t concerned about this particular club, but we did have a discussion about our priorities for Ellie at home that night. Academics are important to us, but they’re not the most important thing. Raising children who are confident in their own identities in Christ and who are kind and loving to others is most important. I submitted that if Ellie was so busy with her schoolwork that she couldn’t spend an hour a week thinking about leadership and community, we had our priorities wrong.

I may be in the minority here, but if I didn’t have time to connect with my daughter or ensure she was focusing on others, whether through a club or in our neighborhood or with the nonprofits we work with, I would pull her from her honors classes in a heartbeat.

Gratitude and Our Relationships

Relationships is another area where gratitude is crucial. Are we making time to build relationships with others, both those similar to us and those who are different? Do we protect family time to the point where there is no margin for others? This is a difficult balance I don’t yet have mastered.

Many of you have likely heard of the five love languages. I am not a words-of-affirmation girl. I don’t need those words to feel love, and I’m not great at giving them to others. (Yes, of course I married a words-of-affirmation guy. That’s just how it works, right? God likes to stretch us!)

Maybe you write personal notes and put addresses and stamps on envelopes. Good for you; people love getting mail. I don’t write notes or texts or even verbally affirm my friends as much as I should. However, it’s an area I’m working on. At a minimum, I’ve recently tried to remind my friends how grateful I am for them on their birthdays.

Regardless of what works for you, I encourage you (and me) to dig deeper in this area, especially this holiday season. Do something extra to remind someone how much you care. You might consider starting with someone who is on the margins in some way and may not get that verbal confirmation regularly.

I hope you noticed that a key theme to gratitude in all these areas is time. We can’t effectively live a life focused on gratitude if we don’t make time to live out that value. God has endless gifts surrounding us and available to us. You may be facing hard things this holiday season. I get that. I’ve found, though, that if we take the time to look, beauty is always in the ashes. May we find moments of gratefulness that surprise us.

Amy Wiebe is a Jesus follower, wife, mom of three, church planter, finance director, and lover of sarcasm and deep conversation with friends. She also loves camping, rafting, skiing, sewing, and having people over. Amy blogs with her husband at fringechurch.com.

Photograph © Kiy Turk, used with permission