Thoughts On Being Grateful

Over the past two months here in Nepal, Heidi and I have been struggling with what it means to be grateful in this place. I decided to post some of our thoughts and questions so that our friends and family members who read this blog can see how and why we’ve been wrestling with this idea. I’m grateful (an appropriate sentiment for this blog entry) to friends who have listened to us and shared their own reflections on the concept of gratefulness in contexts similar to Nepal. I’ve taken the liberty of stealing some of their words and thoughts.

Should we feel grateful in this place? grateful that we were not born here? grateful that we can basically leave whenever we want? grateful that we have the economic power to give someone on the street more money today than they will make this year? Should we be grateful that our apartment is bigger than most peoples' homes and has far less people living in it? We don't feel like we should be grateful for these expressions of inequality. Rather we feel like we should be ashamed, humiliated, outraged. Perhaps instead of being grateful for these things, we should be grateful that despite our accumulation of wealth, despite the legacy of oppression and imperialism that we have inherited, despite our own complicity in systems of injustice, God has mercy on us. We should be grateful that we can be here, that we can experience the pain and beauty of this place, that we can enter into relationships with people whose feet we are not worthy to wash, that we can be redeemed, born again, made new. We should be grateful that there is still hope for us, that we can find joy in emptying our hands.

This whole concept of gratefulness struck us in a new way a few weeks ago. A young Nepali friend invited us over for dinner. We braced ourselves for what we knew would be a living situation that was far different than our own, but we weren’t ready for the “simplicity” of her living situation. Her "house" was a room, smaller than the guest bedroom that we don't use. She lives there with her parents and younger sister and is the sole wage earner for the family. We sat on their single bed while they sat on the floor and served us dinner. They had prepared a feast for us. We wanted to cry and scream. Their hospitality was so genuine. We wanted to get up and leave, run away from it all, back to the comfortable world that we used to live in, where we could be grateful for the “blessings” that we had been given without having to recognize the blood on our hands. We found our way through the meal. It was awkward on many levels, trying to eat cross-legged on a bed, not being able to drink the water they offered because we knew we would get sick, trying to communicate with our small bits of Nepali and their small bits of English- not to mention the fact that all of us knew we live in different worlds. It was awkward and yet in some ways, it was beautiful. We realized that if we allowed our guilt, shame and embarrassment to keep us from being grateful for this gift, we would be adding another injustice to a situation that was already filled with them.

With this experience in mind, we realize that we do need to be grateful for gifts such as these. But it’s not a gratefulness that says “God, thank you for not making me like them”. Heidi and I have both been on too many mission trips where that thought has been the prevailing theme. Rather, we need a gratefulness that acknowledges responsibility. We have to be grateful for these gifts and yet we need to be angry that these inequalities exist in a world where this is plenty for all. Particularly as Americans (who comprise 6% of the world population but consume 42% of its goods), we need to live in and feel this tension. We have to pray a prayer of thanks, along with a prayer of repentance. When asked how we can respond to this situation, a dear friend of ours gave us several suggestions, paraphrased here:

- we can engage in daily acts of mercy, justice and love and so mitigate the effects of evil in and around us.

- we can keep saying “no” to the temptations of consumerism and materialism and keep making more just choices, in small and big ways.

- we can be thankful for the gifts that we are given like the one described above, and by doing so, refuse the temptation to categorize people according to their material wealth.

-we can tell the truth about the world and by doing so, refuse the attempts to rationalize and explain the suffering of so many (like our Nepali friend) and the wealth of so many (like us).

This blog entry is an attempt to carry out the last point. I realize that many of you may read our blog in hopes of seeing beautiful pictures and hearing fun stories about our time here. Certainly, we will continue to post those types of things. But we also feel that by living here, we have an obligation to describe experiences like the one in this post. We do this, not to pretend to speak for people like our Nepali friend or to portray the people here as “impoverished” or “undeveloped”. Rather, we are speaking for ourselves, as two individuals who are recognizing that the world is complicated, that the simple answers we’ve been told most of our lives simply do not answer our questions…we are speaking as two people who are in need of conversion and the grace of God. To remain true to this obligation and to ourselves, we hope to periodically share these kinds of thoughts/experiences on this blog. Thank you for listening.