“Brother Mike” Goodwin, my pastor for 20 years in my young adulthood, used an exhortation in his sermons often enough that it carved a permanent niche in my brain.
“You’ve just gotta have an attitude of gratitude,” he’d say and say again, in a north-Texas drawl that over the years never quite picked up a Missouri cadence. No matter his sermon topic, being grateful for whatever God sent your way was a central theme.
A bazillion people have been using that same phrase for a long time, in selfhelp books, essays and commentaries, but Brother Mike was my original source. And I found that if I followed his advice, I was all the happier for it.
Psychologists bear this out: Grateful people sleep better, hold on to relationships and jobs more successfully, have less stress and a stronger immune system, and even dress better (OK, so I just threw in that last one).
We focus on our gratitude at Thanksgiving time, telling each other how much we appreciate our loved ones, our health and sustenance, our country, and in many cases, our faith. Those are our bedrock blessings.
If you work at it, you’ll find yourself thankful, too, for experiences that taught you something (even if the lessons were painful), or for the seemingly negative occurrence that set you on a positive path.
Then there are the unexpected blessings – the ones you didn’t see coming but keep on auto-dial to replay when your spirit needs a lift.
One of mine dates back 30 years, when I was super-sick with the flu. Down for the count, I was parked on the living room couch, racked with chills and fever, while my husband managed the three youngsters.
Here came my 8-year-old son, bearing a glass of soda and ice he had prepared for me all on his own, wanting to make me feel better. Three decades later, that sweet memory hasn’t lost its power.
The kindness of a cop is in a more recent file. I was driving to Peoria, Ill., to a conference on women’s barbershop singing, my longtime hobby. I had a CD playing and was singing along at the top of my voice, a little too oblivious of my surroundings.
But I snapped out of it when a motorcycle cop on my left, who had to have noticed my full-throttle vocalizing, got my attention and gestured at my speedometer.
Whoops! My speed wasn’t slightly over the limit, it was WAY over. The slowdown took about three eighth-notes of time, and off sped the cop.
A few miles down the road, I spotted him again, writing out a ticket for a speeder who apparently hadn’t made him smile. Grateful me – in the key of C.
And then there’s the butterfly bush.
The same son and his wife like to give us “service” gifts, doing chores they know we won’t do for ourselves. In the planting season after we finished our new home, they took over landscaping a plot at the front of the house.
The most enthusiastic of the shrubs they planted turned out to be the butterfly bush, growing to 5 feet tall, its purple blossoms attracting dozens of butterflies at a time. They flocked around the bush in late summer, a wondrous sight.
About the time the bush’s leaves started turning brown, my life moved indoors, and I forgot all about our fledgling plants for several months.
When spring came back around, I noticed the other plants returning to life – the lilac, the forsythia, the wintercreeper. The once-glorious butterfly bush, however, was brittle and dead.
I recalled some radio advice I’d heard that foliage should be regularly watered in winters without precipitation. Oops. I hated confessing to the kids.
My husband did his best to remove the evidence – chopping down the denuded branches, leaving only about 4 inches of bush to be dug out later.
As spring took hold, I noticed an aggressive-looking weed sprouting at the center of the dead bush. When it reached about 6 inches tall, a notion took root in my mind. Could it be?
The internet confirmed my guess; the leaves matched the photo online. Our butterfly bush was coming back.
By summertime the bush had returned to its former splendor, and the butterflies returned, too.
Not exactly a miracle, since it turns out that some types of butterfly bushes have a yearly resurgence in their job description. But I was thankful, nonetheless. Our bush was a testament to resilience and unexpected blessings.
I’ve had my turn, and now, letter writers, I ask you to take yours. Could you spend a moment telling us what you are grateful for, with an emphasis on “outside the box”? The Leader will publish as many thankful comments as we can in the weeks ahead, before 2018 turns into 2019.
Don’t worry, we’ll still allow space for the political snipping and sniping so many of us enjoy. We can’t create a better world if we don’t call out the problems we see in the current one.
But positivity has a place, too.
And so does an attitude of gratitude.
