Gratitude is the bitter pill we need

How I've been fighting depression recently - Part 2

Oct 28, 2024

This essay is Part 2 in a short series on how God is equipping me with new tools to battle my depression. If you haven’t yet, it would be worth reading Part 1 first here.

I am writing this post from my phone as I sit pinned beneath my sleeping dog, the mixed stench of my coffee and his own vomit filling my nostrils. We make jokes on social media about it being the “law” that if your pet falls asleep on you, you aren’t allowed to get up. In my case, it goes beyond being cute and into being a necessity: Humphrey’s health is quite dearly connected to his levels of uninterrupted sleep, and he never sleeps more deeply than when he’s stretched out across my body.

An hour ago, he threw up for the second time in 12 hours. I cleaned it up and tried to get him to drink some water to no avail. All he wanted was to sleep on my lap. There is laundry to be done and emails to be written, but put simply, I am pinned down by virtue of being the caregiver to a sick animal.

For now, anyway, this is my life. And it has ebbed and flowed in varying degrees of imprisonment for the last twelve months, making it difficult to keep my head above the waters of despair. How easy it is to project my present circumstances into my future, assuming that life will always feel this hopeless.

But I cannot describe this season as anything other than a refining fire, a bittersweet answer to the prayer that I be taught how to think more like Jesus (boy is it true when they say “be careful what you pray for.”)

After being reminded, upon my return from Seattle, that I possess the God-given authority to rebuke the external spiritual oppression feeding off my hopelessness, I have now been left with no choice but to engage my own part in this present battle. See, I believe wholeheartedly that the enemy’s devices have played some role in nurturing the inky black pit in which my mind has dwelled these many months; but I also believe, as a dignified and beloved subject of the Almighty, that I have a part to play. To become more like Jesus is to take up the mantle of autonomy and surrender. It’s both/and. All the time. Some might call it relationship.

So while I cautiously walk down the path towards Christlikeness, the vital step I now find myself working through — amidst a life of fear and confinement and grief — is the act of swallowing, every day, the bitter but oh-so-healing pill of gratitude.

Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place left me no choice. I cannot sit here comfortably in a beautiful home — with the sun shining through my window and food in my belly and an albeit sick but safe puppy on my lap — and say that gratitude eludes me, when only a month ago, I sat in this exact same spot on my couch and read the heartfelt prayers of thanks spoken by two starving women in a Nazi concentration camp. I just can’t do it.

If you’ll indulge me, I need to digress here for a moment. Because I’m aware that I’m entering dangerous territory. The thing is, society has warned us against comparing our hardships to others because everyone experiences hardship differently.

I get this message. I really do. Because the heart behind it (from what I can discern) is an attempt to validate, rather than invalidate, our lived experiences. It’s a sentiment, if I may be so bold, which was born as a response to gaslighting — the act of tricking people into thinking that their perception of an experience isn’t real. And comparison can do that.

It is harmful, for example, to tell someone who is going through a painful relationship breakup “Well at least your mother hasn’t died. Be grateful for that.” In what universe is a response like that going to help someone feel seen or validated or called to experience the healing balm of gratitude? (And let’s not forget that the body can have a similar physiological response to the grief of a breakup as it can to a bereavement, so… there’s that).

Gratitude is, in so many ways, the act of looking outward so that we can place our pain within the wider story of things — but that exercise doesn’t work if we’re made to feel that our pain wasn’t valid to begin with. Where can we place our pain if we’re told our pain isn’t worthy of a place at all?

And here is where I feel we’ve been robbed. Our society seems to present us with only two options: we can compare our experiences to others in an attempt to gain perspective and find gratitude, but in the process, somehow, we invalidate our pain, or we can choose not to compare our grief to anyone else’s in order to honour our own stories.

In case you were wondering, I think that both of these options suck.

Our modern discourse likes to tote around the phrase “this isn’t serving me” or “let go of what doesn’t serve you.” I’m here to tell you that these regimented approaches to relating our pain to others serves neither us nor the people around us. It robs us of perspective, it robs us of respect for ourselves and our fellow man, it robs us of relationship, empathy, and clarity, and it robs us of the healing balm of gratitude.

And yet, in my personal experience (and I suspect I speak for others here, too), gratitude can feel like an illusive, uncomfortable, even cruel invitation. A bitter pill to swallow. Because when I am in the depths of utter heartbreak, feeling like my life isn’t worth fighting for, the last thing I want to be told is to find something to be grateful for. It feels like a command to dismiss the pain that is consuming me from the inside out. It feels like a punch in the jaw. It feels like a personal failure. It feels like another reminder of how broken I am.

So as I go on, I want to make sure you’ve heard me very clearly when I say that by inviting you to practice gratitude, I am NOT dismissing the reality of your pain. By offering you a shift in perspective, I am NOT telling you that your experiences are somehow invalid or less worthy of compassion than someone who may have suffered more than you. Because (and here’s where I might make people angry), I DO believe that some people suffer more than others, and I think that acknowledging this reality is freeing rather than invalidating. It breaks the bounds forcing us into that two-box fallacy which says either your feelings are valid and incomparable, or they’re comparable and no longer valid.

Once again, what if it’s both/and? What if one person’s experience of a relationship breakup really DID traumatise their mind and body as much as another person’s loss of their mother? But then, what if neither of their experiences are anywhere near the level of trauma that a Holocaust survivor endured? What if we’ll never know “who has had it worse” (because as Aslan reminds Lucy, He never tells us any other story but our own), but we can still be pretty sure that some people certainly have had it worse, and these facts don’t negate our own pain? What if we can embrace the sobering perspective that comparison brings to navigating our grief in the cosmic order of things, but we can ALSO hold onto the truth that our God sees our individual pain as utterly valid? He is the God who sustained Corrie Ten Boom in the concentration camps, and He is the God who answers a little girl’s prayer for nicer friends at school. He is the God of both/and.

Can we walk through life with our eyes wide open to the truth that our suffering is valid and that some people suffer worse than others? Because friends, let me tell you, walking with my eyes wide open feels like another invitation to dignity, and with dignity comes healing. I don’t know about you, but I want to be healed more than I want the pain of my story ranked higher than others. That’s not a competition I want to win. You know what I want?

I want to be healed. I want my dog to be healed. All I want in this life is for all to be healed.

The first revelation God gave me about gratitude was back in 2018. I was doing a deep dive into Romans that lasted about 8 months. I diligently filled out the many-pages long workbook, and let me tell you, I only remember ONE thing from the entire study. It was a review question from Romans Chapter 1:

What are the defining characteristics that Paul uses to describe a godless person in verse 21?

As I reviewed the verse, this easy-to-ignore detail metaphorically punched me in the face:

“For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened.”
Romans‬ ‭1‬:‭21‬ ‬‬

Whoa.

So a defining trait of someone who doesn’t know God is a lack of gratitude? Wait, for real?

At first, this revelation was really uncomfortable for me. Not only because of all the aforementioned reasons but because I loved the Lord yet couldn’t remember the last time I’d given Him thanks. There had to be more to it than the puerile conclusion I’d have surely been given by my early 2000’s reformed church — certainly one can forget to practice gratitude and yet still be in relationship with God? (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes. Absolutely).

God mercifully provided clarity for me not long after revealing this scripture, and it came in the form of a clinical study that I stumbled upon in which participants who suffered from depression were separated into two groups: one group was invited to keep a daily gratitude journal, while the other was not.1 Scans were taken of participants' brains before and after the experiment, and it was found that those who practiced gratitude saw more gray matter in the brain “lighting up.” In other words, the former dark blotches on the scans became light, and those test subjects reported feeling an ease in their depression symptoms compared to the control group who felt little to no change.2

I couldn’t help but see the correlation between a physiological light shining on the dark patches of our brain and the warning words of Paul: “Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened.”

And when I applied this phenomenon to my own life, how true it became. Social media is a perfect example: it primes us to look at everyone’s life in comparison to our own, evoking a sense of envy, which is the opposite of gratitude. The more we dwell in an awareness of what we lack, the more, I worry, our senseless hearts become darkened.

Suddenly, gratitude became an invitation. It wasn’t that God was shaming me for having not practiced it — rather, He was trying to show me that I didn’t have to keep thrashing against the dark waves of the sea. I had a choice to grab hold of a rope and pull myself into a lifeboat. He loved me regardless of what I chose, but by virtue of being the good Creator that He is, two truths revealed themselves to me: first, His desire to be glorified through my gratitude triggers a physiological response for my own good (an ability to experience joy and relief from my depression); second, that symbiotic relationship between His glory and my good naturally elicits my gratitude because it’s difficult not to be compelled to give thanks to an Almighty God who loves me quite this much.

In other words, gratitude was sown into my eternal being: in the original perfect plan, I was designed to think this way. I was designed to feel the ease and joy of constantly giving thanks. I was designed to find freedom in gratitude. My foolish heart was not designed to be darkened.

Despite this revelation being one of the first instances in which applied theology truly transformed my way of thinking, approaching the Bible, and practically engaging in my faith, I forgot to practice gratitude as the years became more and more cruel.

And so by the time I found myself feeling like a prisoner in my own home with a sick dog and a growing list of personal health issues, my default was to see the world as nothing but a challenge to endure.

I would thank God for my home and my husband and the fact that I lived in a safe country, sure. But the gratitude amounted to thin words on a page — I did not open my heart up to the truth which beckoned me to freedom again… until the gift of Ten Boom’s book reminded me to give thanks for even the fleas.

And here is where I invite you, dear friends, to embrace the both/and with me. Because I am telling you that even now as I sit beneath the weight of a sick dog who has relapsed in his recovery, the chains of depression aren’t as heavy around my neck as they were three months ago. The only thing that’s really changed is that I rebuked the spirit of despair from my home and I started responding to every hopeless thought with a counter thought of thanks.

So once again, I invite you to remember that your pain is deeply valid… as I boldly remind you that you are also deeply blessed.

Who do I think I am to tell you this? No one, honestly. Just a person who believes that we can see the goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living, and if my writing can even be a crumb of bringing that future into existence for you, then it is well with my soul.

If I place my pain in the cosmic order of things, I find that while I am not so blessed as my friends who brought healthy, normal puppies into their lives, I am beyond blessed to have healthy, normal legs that take me from place to place. Do those two things feel unrelated? Perhaps at first, but not when you think about it. Because here’s the thing: allowing gratitude to course through you so that worship pours out and you can’t help but give glory to God, you must move from a state of mental sleep to a state of being wide awake. You must open your eyes to all the areas of your life in which God richly dwells — areas which the enemy would bid you ignore so that the whole of darkness can swallow you up. Remember, the kingdom of hell wants you to forget just how present God is in your life. Our thinking becomes futile and our foolish hearts darken only when we cease to see how much light surrounds us in even the tiniest details. A beautiful pair of women from a Nazi concentration camp reminded me of this.

Your pain is valid. This world is cruel. You have every right to grieve this broken life that was never meant to be broken. AND by the victory of Christ crucified, there is no pain too great to swallow the joyous victory of eternal life, won for us by the love spilled out in blood on a cross. This is the hope of the gospel, friends. And it warrants gratitude: a seemingly bitter pill which, I promise you, will be a balm to your soul should you choose to swallow.

If my prayer is to be transformed into one like Christ, then I am grateful for the challenge that Humphrey places on my discipline to embody gratitude. Only Christ alone could make me grateful for the painful present moment I endure with my dog in my lap. I wonder if this is what Paul meant when he said “To live is Christ, to die is gain.”

So to finish, I don’t want to lecture you any further but to show you, in real time, how I counter my hopeless thoughts with grateful ones. I don’t do this to brag or show off or tell you that this is how you should be doing it. I share this merely to encourage and to offer clear, practical examples rather than vacuous platitudes. If it helps you, praise God. If it doesn’t, just remember that I’m one woman tucked away on a couch in a teddy bear onesie on a Monday afternoon, writing all this from her phone. Pay me no heed. But pay Him all of it.

Both/and gratitude list:

I am lonely and desperately miss my hometown; and I live close enough to visit that town semi-regularly. I have a car that works, enough money for petrol, and a husband who loves to go on trips with me — what I miss is still accessible to me.
My dog won’t stop eating foreign objects, resource guarding, and struggling with his GI symptoms; and we have the most incredible insurance company and medical team, so our medical bills are affordable, and we aren’t doing this journey alone.
Our dog’s issues prevent us from going on trips; and yet we have two incredible friends who are capable of meeting his needs and looking after him to offer us respite.
My health has left me in chronic pain most days; and I can walk on my own and breathe on my own and see colours and hear music and speak love.
Money is tight and limits us in a lot of ways; and I’m exceedingly blessed that we can afford the specialist food I need to start balancing my hormones and inflammation levels.
I miss my mom every single day; and I am beyond blessed to have such a wonderful relationship with her in which we talk daily and tell each other everything.
My days feel empty; and every day of sunshine this October has filled me with indescribable joy.
We haven’t found a church home in 3 years; and God has still blessed us with community who have supported and prayed for us during this season.
I worry that Humphrey will be sick forever; and I can rest in the comfort that the future is blessedly out of my control and therefore does not yield to my fears.
Every morning, I wake up afraid of what today might bring; and every day is an opportunity to discover the minute nearness of God in the details of my life.

Do you have a both/and gratitude list? I’d love love love to see it. But either way, I pray that you would feel both deeply seen in your pain and richly blessed in your life all at the same time.

Bless you, friends.

All my love,

PSA: If you’re an aspiring Christian writer who has wanted to write an autobiographical book for a long time, but you’ve got a loooong list of things holding you back, then you can grab a free copy of my 7-day devotional, Invited by Joy, when you join the waitlist for my upcoming writing course, Pick Up Your Sword. This devotional is a jam-packed PDF which you can print and work through at your own pace, and it will take you through 7 days of Bible readings to inspire and equip you to pick up your pen. For a time, this booklet was an exclusive gift to all subscribers of The Battle Cry, but I have taken it “off the market,” and from December 1st, it will be priced at £10, so if you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, now is your chance!

Grab your copy!

I have spent ages looking for the original article so that I could link to it, and I cannot find it for the life of me because more recent studies have subsequently replaced this one in the Google hierarchy. From memory, I believe the study was carried out by UCLA, and my research has shown me that further studies into gratitude and its impact on depression have been carried out and provided mixed results; but many medical institutions such as the Mayo Clinic are backing the idea that a gratitude practice can help ease depression symptoms. As a Christ-follower, the correlation between our physical and spiritual health makes perfect sense, so I’m inclined to agree with the pro-gratitude studies.

A few hours after publishing this, one of my Substack friends, Alexandria, told me about an eerily similar post which she’d written on gratitude the previous week. I swear you’d think that we’d had a discussion about it before writing our respective pieces, but alas! The Holy Spirit is clearly just at work. Alexandria’s piece, however, has some much more resourceful links to further studies on the relationship between gratitude and depression/anxiety. I’d highly recommend reading her piece here.