Living a Life of Gratitude When Everything in You Wants to Complain

Living a life of gratitude as a Christian sounds like something you'd cross-stitch on a pillow. Hang it up in the hallway. Walk past it 400 times without reading it. I know this because I've been that guy. I can stand in front of a room full of people and preach thankfulness while internally grinding my teeth over something that happened three days ago that I still can't let go of.

Gratitude is not a mood. It's a practice. And like most practices, it's way harder than it sounds.

There's a story in Luke 17 that wrecks me every time I sit with it. Ten lepers cry out to Jesus for mercy. He tells them to go show themselves to the priest. All ten start walking. All ten get healed on the way. But only one stops, turns around, and goes back to say thank you.

One out of ten.

Here's what gets me. The other nine weren't bad people. They did exactly what Jesus told them to do. They followed the instruction. They were obedient. But obedience and gratitude are not the same thing. You can check every box on the religious to-do list and still miss the heart of the whole thing. That one leper made a decision the other nine didn't. He paused. He recognized what had just happened. And he turned back to the source.

That turning back is where gratitude actually lives.

I think about my own life and the moment 18 years ago when Jesus met me on a path that was heading straight toward death. Meth addiction. Total destruction. And people sometimes ask why I still talk about it. Shouldn't you move past that? Shouldn't you put that chapter behind you? Absolutely not. That moment is the engine of my gratitude. If I could do one thing for the rest of my life, it would be to stay grateful for the day Jesus did something for me that I could never have done for myself.

That's the uncomplicated gospel, by the way. He saved us from a penalty we couldn't pay. Every bit of living a life of gratitude flows from that one reality.

But here's where it gets tricky. The big moments of gratitude come easy. When God shows up in an obvious way, when the miracle lands, when the check arrives right before the lights get shut off. Those moments produce thankfulness almost automatically. It's the ordinary Tuesday that gets me. The slow morning. The kid who won't listen. The email that sets my teeth on edge. Gratitude in the ordinary is where the real fight is.

A few years back, we were fostering two girls. One of them spent weeks talking about how badly she wanted a Bible for Christmas. A nice one. My mother-in-law found this beautiful pink leather kids Bible with all the designs on it. Wrapped it up. Christmas morning comes and all the other kids around her are ripping into toys and gadgets. She opens her gift and the light just drains from her face. In that moment, surrounded by all the shiny distractions, she completely forgot that she was holding exactly what she'd been asking for.

I laugh about it now, but I do the same thing constantly. God gives me exactly what I've been praying for and I'm too distracted by everything else to notice.

Distraction might be the single biggest enemy of gratitude. We live in a world designed to pull our attention in fifteen directions at once. I'll be honest, right around election season I got sucked back into the doom scrolling. One tweet leads to another leads to a search bar rabbit hole leads to me sitting there at midnight wondering what just happened to the last two hours of my life. None of it made me more grateful. None of it brought me closer to God. It just ate time and fed anxiety.

But distraction goes deeper than screens. Some of us are still mentally replaying conflicts from five, ten, twenty years ago. Still distracted by what was instead of present in what is. Like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite. Late thirties, still stuck on the football game from high school, convinced everything would be different if coach had just put him in. Meanwhile, life is happening all around him and he's missing every bit of it.

Isaiah 43:18 says to stop dwelling on the former things because God is doing something new. You can't grab hold of the new thing if both hands are still gripping the old one.

Here's something nobody preaches about on a Sunday morning. Sometimes the reason you can't muster gratitude has nothing to do with your spiritual life. Sometimes your mattress is terrible and you haven't slept well in months. I'm serious. I just went through this. Our mattress had a crater on one side, the sheets wouldn't stay on, and I was waking up every morning feeling like I'd been in a fight. We finally replaced it and within a week my entire outlook shifted. Sleep affects your hormones, your mood, your patience, your immune system. Lack of sleep makes you irritable, short-fused, and unable to see the good in anything. Before you beat yourself up for not being grateful enough, maybe check whether you're hydrated and rested. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take care of your body.

That said, the deepest well of gratitude I've found is not in self-care. It's in the presence of God. When I actually slow down and pray, not the wish-list prayer where I'm running through everything I need, but the kind where I just sit with God and talk to him about who he is. Something shifts. You can't separate God's heart from God's hand. When you spend time understanding his heart, you start recognizing his hand everywhere.

The best moments of prayer in my life have been the simplest. Thank you, God. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for my kids. Thank you for coffee. Thank you for another day where I get to do this.

I keep notes on my phone. Not fancy journaling. Just iCloud notes, scrolling for days. Things I felt God speak to me. Moments that mattered. Encouragements people gave me. Pictures of my kids. I go back through them at night sometimes and it resets something inside me. It reminds me that the story God is writing is good even when the current chapter feels heavy.

If you've never tried a gratitude list, start stupid simple. Three things you're thankful for. Three good things that happened today. The first time I tried it, I struggled to come up with three good things from my day. That told me everything I needed to know about where my head was at.

Living a life of gratitude as a Christian is not about pretending everything is fine. It's about training your eyes to see what God is doing in the middle of what isn't fine. It's the discipline of turning back to Jesus when everyone else just keeps walking toward the priest. It's choosing to be the one out of ten.

Philippians 2 says to do everything without grumbling so that you shine like lights in a crooked generation. Our words carry power. The way we speak about our lives, our jobs, our families, our circumstances shapes not just how others see us but how we see ourselves. Proverbs 18:21 says the tongue holds the power of life and death. That's not poetry. That's mechanics.

So here's the question that won't leave me alone. What if you woke up tomorrow and only had the things you thanked God for today?

Start there. Start small. But start.