Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s hard to believe that this year is almost finished! As someone from the United States, I love the annual November tradition of pausing to spend time with family and to remember to be thankful.

While it’s great to have a day set aside to remind us to be thankful, the truth is that being thankful on a regular basis is crucial! Being thankful on a regular basis improves our mindsets and is associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety, and people who express gratitude on a regular basis tended to rate their relationships as more fulfilling compared to those who don’t. Gratitude is associated with a more positive, optimistic outlook on life in general, and the power of gratitude can actually be measured through our hearts! When people express gratitude, their heart rates decrease (as compared to resentment, which can actually increase it). Choosing an attitude of gratitude had one more, fascinating, impact on people—it increased their willingness to accept help!

Taken together, the research shows that thankfulness acts as a protectant and buffer against negativity, promotes social connection, and increases the chances that we will accept help from someone else—which, in my opinion, also acts as some sort of relationship “glue” that helps draw us closer to one another. No wonder God tells us to give thanks in everything in 1 Thessalonians 5:18 and to enter His gates with thanksgiving in our hearts in Psalm 100:4!

God knows us better than we could ever know ourselves! He knew that gratitude would benefit our minds and hearts (literally on that one!). He also knew that it would promote relationships and collaboration, key factors in unity, which is ultimately how we fulfill His purposes and plans as a Body of believers. However, that last point isn’t just about our relationships with other people—our attitude of gratitude toward God also draws us closer to Him and helps make us more willing to accept His help too. Without these two factors—intimacy with the Lord and dependency upon Him—we are, quite frankly, unable to fulfill our destinies.

It’s only in our complete surrender and constant acknowledgement of our full dependency upon Him that He is able to do His supernatural work through us. It’s only through an intimate relationship with Him that we clearly hear and see what He is speaking and doing moment by moment every day.

So, in the end, it all boils down to relationship. Relationship with God and relationship with one another. In His Word, He gave us a powerful tool to use to help us in our unification and vision-accomplishing journeys—gratitude. The studies that have been done support this biblical principle and I believe, are only just beginning to uncover how powerful it truly is.

Algoe, Sara B., and Annette L. Stanton. “Gratitude when it is needed most: social functions of gratitude in women with metastatic breast cancer.” Emotion 12.1 (2012): 163.

Bartlett, Monica Y., et al. “Gratitude: Prompting behaviours that build relationships.” Cognition & emotion 26.1 (2012): 2-13. doi:10.1080/02699931.2011.561297

Kyeong, Sunghyon, et al. “Effects of gratitude meditation on neural network functional connectivity and brain-heart coupling.” Scientific reports 7.1 (2017): 1-15.

Petrocchi, Nicola, and Alessandro Couyoumdjian. “The impact of gratitude on depression and anxiety: the mediating role of criticizing, attacking, and reassuring the self.” Self and Identity 15.2 (2016): 191-205. doi: 10.1080/15298868.2015.1095794

Wood, Alex M., et al. “The role of gratitude in the development of social support, stress, and depression: Two longitudinal studies.” Journal of Research in personality 42.4 (2008): 854-871. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2007.11.003