23: When Gratitude Is Complicated

Written By Denisa Nica
 

What happens when you have so much to be grateful for, and there’s still something you wish were different?

If you’ve ever wondered why gratitude doesn’t seem to settle everything else, this might feel familiar. In this episode, I talk about gratitude, disappointment, and what happens when the two get tangled together.

If you’re carrying both gratitude and longing right now, I hope this conversation gives you a little more room to be honest about both.

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  • I’m Denisa Nica, and welcome to Walking Anyway. You’re listening to episode 23.

    This is a podcast about living faithfully in uncertain seasons when life feels unclear and nothing is quite settling yet.  If you’re not quite sure how to move through this in a way that feels steady and true, you’re in the right place to keep walking anyway. Each week I offer a reflection and a gentle way to help you live faithfully, one ordinary step at a time.

    I’m an author and spiritual director, and the founder of The Table— an online contemplative community shaped by a weekly rhythm, where women practice this kind of faithful living together, at their own pace, in the middle of their real lives and faith.I live in Spain, where life moves a little slower, and that has changed the way I pay attention, and the way I live inside my own life.

    Today I want to talk about gratitude, which feels especially fitting the day after Canadian Thanksgiving. But I’ve been wondering lately if there are ways we can make gratitude carry more weight than it was ever meant to carry. I’ve noticed myself doing that recently, in a way I hadn’t really seen before. So today, I want to tell you about that. Listen in.

    Most mornings, I take my first coffee with me on my walk.

    I’ve been doing this for a while now—coffee in hand, usually fairly early, walking and praying through our neighbourhood streets. It’s actually become one of my favourite parts of the day.

    After about an hour, I come home and have breakfast. I’ve been trying to eat more protein in the mornings, which sounds much more impressive than it is. I’m not making eggs and bacon or anything like that. Usually it’s Greek yogurt with papaya or mango and some seeds. And then, quite often, before my morning workout, I make a second coffee and take it out into the garden.

    This is probably more information than you needed about my morning coffee schedule.

    But I’ve been thinking about that second coffee lately, because I’ve noticed something I do while I’m sitting there.

    I’ve been carrying an ache. I’m going to keep the details private because they’re not really the point. It’s simply something I wish were different.

    And I’ve been going about my life with it—walking in the mornings, working, making dinner, talking to people I love. It’s just there. And every once in a while, when the ache comes up, I notice myself doing something.

    I start arguing with it. Come on, Denisa. Look at your life. Look at where you live. And the thing is, when I look, there is plenty to see. The light here in Spain is still one of my favourite things about living here. I lived in Vancouver all my adult life and Vancouver is beautiful. I loved living there. But there were fall and winter—and, let’s be honest, spring—months when I would open the weather app on my phone and see rain for Monday, rain for Tuesday, rain for Wednesday, and basically rain as far as the forecast could see.

    So I don’t think I’ve completely gotten used to all this sun. Or the sea. I’ve lived here in southeast Spain for more than 2 years now and I still take pictures of it all the time, as though I don’t already have hundreds of pictures of exactly the same sea on my phone.

    I love living here, I really do. And then, of course, the argument continues: Other people have it so much worse.

    Well. Yes. They do. There are much worse things than carrying an ache while drinking your second coffee in a sunny garden a few minutes from the Mediterranean.

    But that’s the strange part. I don’t need anyone to remind me to be grateful. I already am.

    I’m grateful when I’m walking in the morning under a completely clear sky. I’m grateful for the light and the warmth. I’m grateful for the sea, for the beauty of this place, and for this life I get to live here. And I understand why I do this. I don’t want to miss the goodness of my actual life because I’m preoccupied with what isn’t here. I don’t want grief to make me ungrateful. I want to remember what I’ve been given. I want to remember answered prayers.

    But at some point, I’ve noticed I started using those good things to argue with myself.

    Look how much you’ve been given. God has answered prayers.

    Why are you still sad about this? Why do you still want that?

    And none of that makes me more grateful. I’m already grateful.

    Mostly, it makes me feel a little guilty for still having the ache.

    I’ve probably been doing some version of this for a long time. I just hadn’t noticed it quite this clearly before. I’ve wanted gratitude to talk me out of grief and disappointment.

    And the timing of all this isn’t lost on me. If you’re listening when this episode comes out, yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada. Which means we’ve just had a whole day set aside to remember what we’re grateful for. I love that.

    I just wonder if sometimes, without meaning to, I take gratitude one step further and ask it to make me okay with everything else.

    Maybe you know something about this too. You can love your family very much and something in your family can still hurt. You can have an answered prayer in one part of your life and another prayer you’ve been carrying for years.

    And because I am a Christian, I can make this spiritual very quickly. If I really trusted God, shouldn’t I be okay with this?

    And if I peel one more layer, there’s another question: If God has already given me so much, is it ungrateful to keep asking for something else?

    That’s a harder question for me. There are certainly times when I’m invited to surrender something. There are desires I’ve had that changed, and things I thought I needed that, looking back, I’m grateful I didn’t receive.

    But I’m not sure gratitude is supposed to correct me every time something hurts. I think there can be a little more mercy than that. We can be grateful, and the ache can still be there.

    Which brings me back to that second coffee in the garden. There’s nothing especially spiritual about it. Half the time I’m probably looking at my phone or already thinking about what I need to do that day. But sometimes I put it down.

    And the coffee is good. Coffee, by the way, is the one thing I couldn’t replace when we moved to Europe. We still faithfully ship our Grizzly Bear coffee from our favourite BC roaster across the Atlantic. I’m learning there are many forms of faithfulness.

    The coffee is good. The sun is coming through. There are birds making a ridiculous amount of noise in the trees.

    And that’s it. Nothing gets solved. The coffee doesn’t have to solve anything. Neither does the sea. They can just be good.

    And the thing that hurts doesn’t have to become good either. I don’t have to be grateful that it happened or hurry to figure out what God might be teaching me through it.

    Maybe one day I’ll understand it differently. I don’t know. But I don’t need to understand it today in order to receive what’s good today. And receiving something good doesn’t mean nothing ever needs to change. Sometimes something really does need to change. It just may not be what I need to figure out right now.

    Right now, my prayer can be very simple. Thank you. And: Please.

    I’m beginning to think those two prayers belong together more often than I’ve allowed them to. Thank you for this. And please, God, this too. The coffee. The light. The sea that I still take far too many pictures of. God, thank you for this.

    None of those things have to make up for the ache. They can just be good. We don’t have to call everything good in order to receive what actually is good.

    And perhaps something has already come to mind while you’ve been listening.

    If it has, you don’t need to make anything of it. You can simply receive it. Thank you for this.

    Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably take my first coffee on my walk again. And later, chances are I’ll make that second coffee and take it outside.

    I’ll probably look at my phone more than I meant to. The birds will be making far too much noise. The ache will most likely still be there. And if the sun is out, I hope I notice it.

    Thanks for listening to episode 23 of Walking Anyway.

    I hope this small practice of receiving what is good and saying, God, thank you for this, gives you a little more room to be grateful for what is here without having to pretend that everything is okay.

    And if something surfaced for you as you were listening today—something you don’t necessarily need to solve, but might like some space to bring before God—that’s part of what we do in one-to-one spiritual direction.

    If spiritual direction is new to you, or you’re curious about what it actually looks like, you can listen to Episode 16, Keep Company: Spiritual Direction. And if you find yourself wanting that kind of space in your own life, I do have a few places available for one-to-one spiritual direction. You’ll find all the details in the show notes.

    If you’d like to keep having these conversations with me, make sure you’re following the show so we can meet back here next week. And if you have a minute to leave a rating or a review, I’m always grateful—it really does help new listeners find the show.

    And thank you for being here. I don’t take it lightly that you make room for these conversations in your week.

    If someone came to mind while you were listening today, maybe send this episode their way. You don’t need to explain very much. Sometimes, “I thought of you when I heard this,” is enough.

    As always, you can find me at denisaonica.com., or on Instagram at denisa.o.nica. I’d love to see you there.

    As you step back into your day, notice what stayed with you, and let that be enough for today. Just like light moving through a room— you don’t need to see everything at once to keep living faithfully here.

    I’ll close with a few lines from Kairos: When the Holy Meets the Daily, my book of poems inspired by the Psalms. These are from my poem on Psalm 105: “ Help me gather each and all my secret longings, aching losses, on your page. Then, I will cut the sheet into tiny pieces, make you confetti and throw them into air and on the dusty ground. Teach my feet to dance upon disappointment.”

    Thanks for listening, I’ll be here with you next time.

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22: What’s Holding Me This Fall