The Forgotten Virtue of Gratitude

Are you an envious person? Have you ever wished the most popular girl in school woke up with a bad hair day? Have you ever wish that guy who seems to have all the luck would just once walk out to his truck in the parking lot and find a flat tire? You and one other is up for first chair in the band program. Only one space is available. He gets it. How do you feel? Everyone has a date to homecoming except you. The person you would have liked to gone with has asked someone else. How do you feel?

You’re out in the front yard one Saturday morning. You strike up a conversation with your next-door neighbor. She’s beaming about how good life is treating her. As she explains, the most perfect, compassionate, most kindhearted man in the entire world, and her husband, are one and the same person. Her children get straight A’s in school and letter in varsity sports. You, on the other hand, have been talking about separation with your husband and your eldest son just got expelled from school for selling marijuana in the boy’s locker room. Do you find your neighbor inspiring?

Envy is more than the simple desire to have what another has. It is the hatred of what another has, or of what another person has become. The story of Naboth’s vineyard in I Kings 21 deals directly with envy. Naboth has a vineyard beside the palace of King Ahab of Samaria. Everyday King Ahab would look down from his window and see the luscious grapes of Naboth's vineyard. The fruit in Naboth's garden was more succulent than all the acres of his vineyards. He demanded that Naboth sell his vineyard. Naboth refused on the account of it being family land. King Ahab went away envious. His wife, Queen Jezebel, sees him moping around and asks what is the problem. Like a preschooler who refuses to get his away, he tells his wife of his jealousy for Naboth's vineyard. She schemes up a plan to have Naboth killed and her husband's envy resolved by possessing Naboth's vineyard. King Ahab is confront by the prophet Elijah for his actions and told, "In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth , dogs will also lick up your blood" (I Kings 21: 19).

Envy is the longing for another not to have something that you wished you had. Envy kills all love, pity, mercy, and compassion. God tells Ahab and all of us who struggle with envy, “You have sold yourself" (I Kings 21:20)! Envy makes us ungrateful. When we struggle with envy we spend all our time focused on what others have and forget that we are blessed people.

Gratitude replaces envy by turning our focus on what we have been given. You don’t have to wait for everything to be perfectly straightened out in your family or at school, or for all your problems to go away. You can choose today to be a person of gratitude. Gratitude is an attitude. It is one’s approach toward life. If you make the mistake of allowing your circumstances, or the people around you to dictate gratitude then you are just waiting for envy to creep up and destroy you.

I am a horrible gardener. But I do like flowers. I don’t know which flowers need to be planted where. How much sun light this one needs versus this one. Or even how much water they need. I just plant the pretty little things and hope for the best. So I planted these little annuals in the bed beside the house. I didn’t know if they would come up but sure enough I have these pretty little flowers. Do they get enough sunlight Probably not! Do they get enough water? Probably not! But they have bloomed where they were planted. I believe that to be one of the secret’s to life: bloom where you are planted. You may not be where you want to be in life today. You may not have the perfect family. You may not get into the school of your dreams. You may not get the role in the drama that you had hoped. Life may not always go your way.

God has planted us exactly where God wants us to be at this particular time in our life. We cannot understand it always. God may be teaching us something, pushing us toward something or someone, or stretching us to see how we will respond. God has us here for a reason. God may be using you to be at work in the life of someone else. I don’t understand it all. I can’t always figure it out but I trust that God knows what God is doing. Don’t let envy take root in your heart. Practice daily the attitude of gratitude.