Pain and Gratitude: Fighting for Control

I can’t write about gratitude without writing about pain. 

If you don’t observe pain in the world, how can you possibly experience gratitude? 

Dictionary.com defines gratitude as “the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful.” Meaning we can both feel grateful and be grateful. 

Feelings of gratitude may come and go with a moment. 

Imagine you win a competition. The hours of training, the countless tears, and the doubts and insecurities culminating in a single moment. All your hard work paid off. You’re grateful for the recognition, the support of your community, and the victory itself. 

You feel grateful. In part because it’s over and your work was worth it, but mostly because you endured so much pain to get there. 

Pain and gratitude seem to exist in some sort of tension with one another. 

Feelings of gratitude are usually accompanied by some level of relief, joy, and hope. Pain doesn’t magically disappear but it’s brought into perspective in light of a deeper reality.

Yet, when a feeling of gratitude becomes an anchor in our soul, the feeling evolves to become the quality of gratitude. We are grateful rather than merely feeling grateful. We learn to live and work from the place of relief, joy, and hope that gratitude creates. 

You notice this when you come face to face with your toughest battle yet. Recovery.

You started on this road thinking it would make everything better and, honestly, it seems like everything is getting worse. The pain is immense and overwhelming. You feel hopeless and lost.

And then you remember…

“I won that competition. I trained hard and overcame the odds, doubts, and insecurities. I can face hard things. I am a strong overcomer.”

Recalling a previous feeling of gratitude anchors your present moment in gratitude. Gratitude is now a weapon you wield against pain and adversity.

The problem is most of us don’t live in a perpetual state of gratitude. Life happens and overwhelms our soul. Rather than rooting our present moment in gratitude and experiencing relief, joy, and hope, pain takes over and hopelessness becomes an anchor. 

Pain and gratitude are constantly fighting for control. 

Yesterday, you felt hopeless and weak. Today, you feel strong and capable. Tomorrow? Only time will tell.

There’s good news: you don’t have to resign yourself to the mercy of your feelings each day. 

We can fix the fight in our favor with a little bit of intention. You might call this “faith of a mustard seed.”

Three Tools to Fix the Fight

Personal Promises

One tool that Pure Desire teaches to help us anchor our present moment in gratitude is called the “Personal Promise.” 

A Personal Promise comes from a moment in time where God intersected our lives in such a way that we learned a little bit more about the person He created us to be. It’s an identity tool that centers us in God’s eternal truth about us. 

Personal Promises get embedded into our mind and become an anchor. We can enter into a state of gratitude as we recall God’s truth about us. This means that when pain and adversity come, we’re ready for it. Check out this really good Pure Desire Podcast episode that gets super specific about Personal Promises.

Daily Gratitude

Since pain and gratitude are constantly locked in battle, we have to create rhythms that fix the fight. We can’t hope to win the battle if we’re only concerned with victory when we sense we’re losing. 

Said another way, if we wait until we feel completely hopeless, it’ll be hard to turn to gratitude. 

Daily gratitude is a simple practice where you write down three things you’re grateful for each morning. 

I’m grateful for my loving wife. I’m grateful for my church community. I’m grateful there’s usually not much traffic on my commute to work.

It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing imaginable. The point is to pause and engage your thinking brain that can find beauty in the world around you. This creates feelings of gratitude. 

Over time, this practice will help you to live in a state of gratitude. 

I need to do a lot more of this.

Gratitude Ladder

All this is well and good but you might be reading this thinking:

I’m hopeless NOW and don’t know where to start to get out of this hole. 

I like the image of a hole here because hopelessness can feel dark, claustrophobic, and lonely. But what if in the darkness we discovered a ladder and could climb out of the hole? 

Here’s how the ladder might look for someone in recovery:

I’m grateful to have people in my life who love me. I’m lovable and I’m changing. People love me. I will change. People loved me. I need to change. People loved me deeply. I hurt them badly. I’ve ruined my relationships. All the bridges are burned.

The ladder itself may have any number of rungs. The goal is to consider the reality of why you feel hopeless at the bottom and gradually consider the reality behind each reality. 

Eventually, you get to a thought or truth that you can be grateful for. One you can latch onto and climb out of the hole. 

There are probably other great ways to practice gratitude. You’ll need to try different methods and find what works for you. But gratitude is one of the most powerful tools you can use to fix the fight and overcome pain and adversity.

Yesterday, you felt hopeless and weak. Today, you feel strong and capable. Tomorrow? Choose gratitude.

The views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are those of the author alone and do not reflect an official position of Pure Desire Ministries, except where expressly stated.