Gratitude Makes the Difference :- By Stephen D. Edwards

Gratitude is a powerful force that we can harness. It’s not like the power of an internal combustion engine harnessing the power of burning fuel, but it’s more powerful and far less complicated. Gratitude was one of the keys that led me to gain freedom from depression.

I used to think there was no purpose in gratitude if I couldn’t tell anyone about it. It turns out that just being thankful turns life from pessimism to optimism.

Now let me back up a little. I was depressed for about 35 years. The healing came as a complete surprise to me, because I had long accepted the lie that depression was my destiny. The truth revealed itself by way of negative self-talk that led me to make plans for suicide. It was the attitude of gratitude that I had already begun to cultivate over the previous six years that turned it all around. Gratitude reduced the plans for suicide to ashes and replaced them with plans for good, sanity and hope for a good future.

It takes action to develop gratitude. It’s good to dream of great things, but it must start small in order to have a chance of beating pessimism or depression.

Pen to Paper

Write down what you are grateful for in a journal－at least on loose paper. Don’t use your computer, because the action of using pen and paper will make what you write down more meaningful to you. You will be able to track how your gratitude changes as you progress through the exercise.

Write a New Item on Each Day

As you start this process you may not think of the things you’re grateful for, but start with the simple things like the roof over your head, the food in your pantry and the clothes you wear.

When I say start small, I mean start by reminding yourself that you should be grateful for things you wouldn’t necessarily think. Why do I think you might not think of these things? Because I didn’t. I took them for granted, which is why I was stuck in depression.

Step It Up

After you’ve done the first two steps for a while, it’s time to try something different. Post three items of gratitude on social media each day for 21 days. This will do two things for you. First, you will bring your friends into your action as accountability partners. They won’t necessarily be aware of their role, but once they see your first post, some of them may think you won’t pull it off. Second, you will be amazed at how grateful you’ve really become and the things you are truly grateful for.

After you’ve done the first two steps for a while, it’s time to try something different. Post three items of gratitude on social media each day for 21 days. This will do two things for you. First, you will bring your friends into your action as accountability partners. They won’t necessarily be aware of their role, but once they see your first post, some of them may think you won’t pull it off. Second, you will be amazed at how grateful you’ve really become and the things you are truly grateful for.

I read a story recently in Corrie Ten-Boom’s memoir The Hiding Place. She and her sister Betsy were in prison during World War II. Betsy was in a room knitting socks as her assigned work. The room was infested with fleas, which annoyed her at first. When she realized that the presence of the fleas meant that the German guards didn’t want to enter the room to do their job of harassing the prisoners, she became grateful for the fleas!

When I did this exercise myself it was the beginning of a turnaround to becoming an optimist.

The first of these things is to write down the things for which I’m grateful every day. The key to this is to actually write it down on paper or on our computers, because it will mean more to us. For most of us these things are the roof over our heads, the food we have in our pantries and the clothes we wear.

To grow the gratitude further, we need to start thinking of other things to add to the gratitude list we’ve started. These things might be the people in our lives, our employment, our mentors, partners and so on.

One way to build up the gratitude in our hearts is to start a seven-day gratitude challenge on social media and challenge a friend each day. Over the period of the challenge, we post 21 distinct things for which we are grateful. This was actually the first gratitude exercise I tried. I surprised myself because I didn’t think I had 21 things for a gratitude list.

With gratitude part of a daily routine, we can consider turning our thankful hearts to the things we wouldn’t normally think of first when we think of gratitude. For example, I’m actually grateful that I endured depression. It brought me the opportunity to write this book. And I will be grateful for every person who finds new tools in this book to fight depression and find freedom. In Corrie ten Boom’s autobiography The Hiding Place, she tells how her sister Betsy reminded her to be grateful in everything, emphasizing “everything,” while they were imprisoned at Ravensbrück in Germany; Betsy was even grateful for the fleas! Corrie complained silently. What was her sister talking about? On another day, Betsy was knitting socks with a large group of prisoners when she noticed that the guards were not entering the room or harassing them. She figured out later that it was because of the fleas that those SS officers refused to enter the room. She was now grateful for the fleas rather than in the circumstance of having to live with the fleas.

read also: Let’s Kill the Spirit of Complaint and Murmur

– Be thankful in everything

If we really want to see gratitude flourish in a big way, we can write our gratitude list on a poster board with sticky notes. When we fill up the poster with notes, we will have a real and graphic way of seeing just how grateful we are.

Once I gained freedom from depression, I became even more grateful. That healing didn’t come by depression leaving; it came by joy displacing it, because joy is not the opposite of depression. Joy makes depression leave as light disperses darkness. Joy is also not a greater happiness. It’s a new state of being. When my gratitude fully became a daily habit in my life, it was as though my subconscious mind wrote down “joy” and put it in an envelope of gratitude to deliver to me.

This may seem obvious, but we need to be thankful for everything we have. Furthermore, I also found that when I am grateful not only for everything but in everything, I eventually became thankful for a lot more. It empowered my joy so abundantly that I have become grateful all the time.

– Pray often

As I mention in previous chapters, prayer is effective. And it’s not as much about praying for the things we need as much as it is about praying for others or to bless them. If we’re anything like I was, we think that we should pray only when we need something or only for ourselves. It’s more than that.

The big picture is both about us and those around us. In a bigger picture, I wrote this book because I prayed about others and what to do. When we pray about others and their needs, large blessings come our way. The best way to explain this is an analogy of extremes. When everyone looks out for praying for others, then we take care of each other as well as ourselves. However, when the only prayers we say are only for ourselves, complete anarchy and chaos is near.

When you and I pray only for our own needs, we merely survive. When we pray for others we have significance, and people look up to us.

I pray all the time and for everything. I pray for every encounter I have with everyone I meet, before and after. I pray for a house or building before I enter it. It’s more than praying to bless food before I eat.

Praying for others is also about loving our neighbors, even the unlovable. For me, it’s especially the unlovable.

While I was still stuck in depression, I used to ask myself, “How can I pray for others while I still suffer?” I look back now and think, “How could I have been so selfish?” The prayers I could have said back then would have drawn me out of depression, which had its roots in self-absorption and selfishness. The best thing about prayer is that it adds fuel and power to our gratitude.

– Always rejoice

The Oxford English Dictionary defines rejoice as “feel or show great joy or delight.” Rejoice is a verb, which is why I say that joy displaces depression. Joy is an essential part of life, because it empowers us to endure life’s struggles. With it we have confidence instead of anxiety.

I believe we can all agree that rejoicing is preferable to remaining in depression. Putting on a face for the crowd is far from what we should do, but many do it. However, if in the privacy of our homes we can act for ourselves that we have joy in our lives, we should begin to feel this eventually. We can fake it until we make it and enjoy life as we go along. However, the purpose in doing this is to get a sense of what making it might feel like and foster

Before I started doing these things, I doubted that they would help me at all. I had to push myself to try it and not just a little at a time.

When I took on the gratitude challenge I mention above, I didn’t think I could come up with 21 things for which I was grateful, but I did. From then on, I could always find a reason to be grateful for something in my life. However, we need to be grateful in everything. Everything means all things, not just this or that. God doesn’t want us to cherry-pick what we want to include in our gratitude box. He wants everything in, so go all in!

read also: get to know the Holy Spirit

Gratitude had a profound effect on me, as I find now that I’m grateful for everything rather than merely in everything. My story is not more powerful than yours once you have you have healed. Everyone has a story, and no one’s testimony has more power than anyone else’s. Why? That is because every story that ends in healing from depression is a story of hope.

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[1] Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsy give thanks for the flea infestation in the Ravensbrueck prison during World War II. Corrie ten Boom. The Hiding Place. Minneapolis, MN: World Wide Publications, 1971: 198-199, 208.