Choosing to Be Grateful

Dannah Gresh: Mary Kassian says she’s humbled by her friend’s grateful responses in the midst of suffering.

Mary Kassian: It’s such a good reminder. It’s a sharpening reminder that God gives us the ability to make that choice to choose gratitude. Really, what we’re choosing when we choose gratitude, is, we’re choosing Him. We are choosing to see how big He is and to be grateful for that.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Choosing Gratitude, for Friday, November 15, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Today on Revive Our Hearts we’re finishing up an interview Dannah conducted with our friend Mary Kassian. If you’ve listened to Revive Our Hearts for any length of time, you’ve probably heard Mary’s voice before.

She’s a wife. She’s a mom, a professor, an international speaker, and an author. Her most recent book is titled, Growing Grateful. The subtitle is, Live Happy, Peaceful, and Contented. It’s a beautiful book. You’re going to love it, and it’s perfect for this time of the year with the Thanksgiving holiday just around the corner here in the United States.

Today Dannah starts us off with a question.

Dannah: How are you doing with your gratefulness? If you were to actually have a grateful meter in front of you right now, and you had to honestly put the knob on an accurate assessment of how you’re doing in that area, would it be all the way up, pinning it to a ten? Or would you be all the way back at the beginning, just starting your grateful journey, just learning how to be grateful?

Well, no matter where you are, I think you’re going to be encouraged by Mary today. Mary, welcome back.

Mary: Thanks, Dannah. Good to be with you.

Dannah: Can I ask you a question?

Mary: Sure.

Dannah: That is why you’re here—for me to ask you questions and for you to say smart things. (laughter) Were you always grateful?

Mary: No, I wasn’t always grateful, and no, I’m not always grateful even now. And yet, I’m far more grateful than I used to be.

I remember, when I was younger, at the beginning of my gratitude journey . . . This is a great Revive Our Hearts story because this goes back even before Revive Our Hearts to Elisabeth Elliot, Gateway to Joy, which was the precursor to the Revive Our Hearts radio program.

Elisabeth Elliot had a radio program. I was a young mom. It was a new experience for me to be out of the professional world and into the diaper world. I can’t say that I was super grateful at that time. I was grumbling. I probably had a little bit of resentment in terms of, “Why am I the one that always gets the dirty jobs?” And on and on and on.

Dannah: Did you miss being at work?

Mary: I missed being at work. Yes, I missed the whole professional buzz and the whole professional life. It was an adjustment for me.

I remember listening to the radio one morning as I was going about my household things that I was doing, and Elisabeth Elliot was on. There was a quote that stopped me dead in my tracks. And this is the quote: She said, “It is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life.”

That just stopped me dead in my tracks. In fact, I was so struck by that that I went running to grab a pen and a sticky note, and I wrote it down. “It is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life.”

I had it on that sticky note, and I kept that sticky for probably ten years until the ink faded, and I couldn’t read it anymore. That quote was on my fridge. I put that quote on my mirror. I put that quote in my office. I put that quote everywhere to remind me. I moved it around everywhere to remind me that it is possible to be thankful about what I’m given.

Dannah: You know, I’m seeing women right now grabbing sticky notes in their homes, pulling over from car pool to go grab them from their purses.

Mary: Yes! Go grab them. It’s always possible to be thankful. And you know what? Coming from Elisabeth Elliot, that had some extra bite to it because Elisabeth Elliot had some tough circumstances in her life.

I mean, her first husband was murdered, another husband died of cancer, and so when she was talking about, “It’s always possible to be thankful,” she had some life circumstances that were really tough that really could have caused her to be grumbly and to be resentful, and yet she chose gratitude.

Dannah: So, Mary, how did that impact you as a young, stay-at-home mom? What was the difference?

Mary: It made a difference because as soon as I got my eyes off myself and started thinking that, “Yes, it is possible to be thankful for what is given . . .” And, of course, Elisabeth Elliot came at gratitude from a Christian perspective. She said, “You’re not necessarily grateful for the circumstance you’re in, but you’re grateful for the God who helps you get through that circumstance. You’re grateful for the God who gives you joy. You’re grateful for the God who enables you to endure every storm.”

I think of 1 Thessalonians 5:18. We’ve mentioned this verse a couple of times over the last few days. “Give thanks in everything, in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

That’s so counterintuitive. I think the Bible gives us that instruction because we have a tendency to complain and grumble when life gets hard.

Dannah: I have been soaking myself in Psalm 131 this past few weeks and months because it’s a three-verse chapter about being content in God’s presence. David either wrote it (I mean, scholars don’t really know), but they think he wrote it either when his was marriage was strained because his wife was mocking him for the way he worshipped the Lord publicly, or during a time when Saul was seeking to destroy him and cancel him—that’s what we call it.

Mary: Cancel culture.

Dannah: Cancel culture, but this was a little more deadly of a cancel culture.

Mary: Yes, an extreme cancel.

Dannah: And yet, he finds contentment. How? By getting his eyes off himself.

Mary: Exactly.

Dannah: That’s just what you just said a moment ago. That is the key. In our selfie culture, I think our discontent and our lack of gratitude is fueled and fed by a self-focus.

Mary: Absolutely. We see the bigness of the problem. We see the bigness of the challenge facing us, or the bigness of the unhappiness or discontentment, or the issue becomes so big in our eyes. And because we have a self-focus, if we were to get our eyes off of self and off of the bigness of the problem and on to the bigness of God, our hearts would swell with gratitude.

You mentioned David, and you mentioned the Psalms. David actually had a lot of hard things in his life—a lot of difficulties in his marriage, a lot of difficulties in his family, a lot of difficulties with persecution and people. Saul was seeking his life. He wanted to kill him. And then, just with being king, there were a lot of pressures.

There were so many different things going on in David’s life, so many reasons where he could have grumbled and complained. And sometimes he did take his heartaches to the Lord and poured out his heart to the Lord. And yet, he made a habit of counseling his soul to be grateful during tough times.

Psalm 103:2 says, “My soul . . .” So he’s talking to himself—he’s saying, “Self/soul, my soul.” “. . . . praise the Lord and do not forget all his benefits.”

So he’s giving himself some advice there, and he’s saying . . .

Dannah: Yes, I love that! That is biblical self-talk right there. In a world where we’re always talking about self-talk, self-care, self-this, self-that; I think, just like gratitude can be directed to an improper source not correctly attributed to the source of everything we have, I think that our self-talk can often be misdirected.

And here we see David saying, “Soul, praise the Lord!”

Mary: Yes, exactly. He’s giving himself a pep talk, and he’s just going, “Come on!” Like, “Come on! Snap out of it! Praise the Lord. Do not forget all His benefits.” Because we tend to forget the benefits when we’re facing times of crisis, and when we’re facing hard times.

Dannah: Yes.

Now, you said something really important that I don’t want to skip over, and that is that David did not fail to lament. He did not bring his problem to God. You’re not saying that we have to have a fake gratitude, a super smile that never goes away, that we can’t grieve, that we can’t ask God our hard questions.

In fact, I think we have lots of examples in Scripture of people like David and prophets who did grumble to God. They brought Him their questions, their doubts, their laments. Right?

Mary: I think there’s a difference between lamenting and grumbling, actually. I think that when we lament, we recognize the pain and the difficulty and how hard it is, and we bring it before the Lord, and we ask the Lord for assistance in getting through it. We ask Him to solve it. We ask Him to resolve it. We ask Him to bring His power into the situation and change it.

But that’s different than grumbling against God and saying, “God!” Like shaking our fists, and saying, “God, how dare You! How dare You let this happen in my life!” I think that coming to God with our heartache is biblical. But coming to Him with a fist shaking in His face, saying, “How dare You do this!” is petulant. And so there’s a difference.

And yet, even in the deep sorrow and pain and hardship . . . And many of you listeners are facing situations like that.

You’re facing relationship problems. You’re facing problems, perhaps, with a child who is wayward. You’re facing health problems, perhaps a battle with cancer and chemo and what that looks like endless trips to the doctor.

Perhaps you have a child who is struggling and suffering. I know that pain of having a special-needs child and watching that child suffer.

We can bring all those difficult, hard, painful, painful situations to the Lord and lay them out before Him and come to Him with our tears because He keeps our tears in His bottle. And yet, at the same time, we can counsel our souls. “My soul, praise the Lord and do not forget all his benefits”—do not forget.

Do not forget, Mary, when you’re in a hard time, do not forget that God is big. This problem looks so big, and yet God is bigger, and He’s on the throne. He is in control.

Dannah: Yes. I think when we bring God our questions and our doubts, we can bring it with gratitude. Right?

Mary: Absolutely.

Dannah: I wrote a Bible study on Habakkuk a few years ago, and studying that book was really life-changing for me.

Mary: How do you say that? You go “Habak-kuk”? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Canadian in me. I always go, “Haba-kuk.”

Dannah: Well, I’m not even going to say it the way I think it’s said because you have to sort of make a gross sound with the back of your throat—which isn’t ladylike. (laughter)

But he starts out in his book really grumbling because the world around him . . . Maybe it looked a little bit like 2020 in our world—although I think it was worse for him. But there were lots of problems. There were sinful people. God’s people were far from Him. The Israelites had taken on the pagan culture.

And he’s, like, “God, do something!”

And God says, “I’m going to do something.” And He talks about this even more evil-people group that’s going to come in and take them into exile. And this news is not very comforting. And yet, the end of the book is a song of praise and gratitude.

I want you to unpack this, Mary, because it’s a very treasured verse to a lot of people. Habakkuk 3:17–18:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there’s no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet [even then, even though, yet] I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. (NIV)

You write about this in your book. What thoughts flow from your heart on these verses?

Mary: This is a classic things-are-going-from-bad-to-worse situation he’s describing here. Many of us have faced that in our lives where things are bad. Then we think, “That’s as bad as they can get,” and then they go from bad to worse. And so Habakkuk was describing that in these verses.

It was a national crisis, and the situation was getting more and more dire. First of all, there were no figs. The fig tree was a major source in Israel. And the fig tree didn’t blossom. Now, figs served as a delicacy, so losing them was a little bit of an annoyance

Dannah: They were fancy.

Mary: They were fancy foods. So, if you lost your fancy food, and you had to go to your meat and potatoes, “Well, okay. We can put up with that. It’s annoying.” Maybe people could grumble about it, but it wasn’t really that big of a deal.

And then he describes, “There’s no fruit on the vines.” All right. So grapes were used to produce the common beverage in the country. Everybody used to drink beverages made of grapes because that was just easier. So that was, actually, a major inconvenience. It would be like no milk. Right? There’s no milk in your fridge. You can’t get milk. And so it’s a little bit more than an annoyance. It’s actually an inconvenience.

So then he went on to the olive crop. They lost their olive crop. Now, that would get a little bit dicey because that would hamper their ability to function because the olive crop . . . They used to press the olives, so there would be no oil for cooking. There would be no oil for lighting lamps. So that would be like your power grid going out. It was getting more serious. It wasn’t just an inconvenience. They were starting to really struggle. And after that, they faced the loss of grain, which was even more critical. That was economic disaster. 

So this is the kind of situation that Habakkuk was facing. It was even more critical because it meant not only economic disaster, but actually starvation for large segments of the population.

Dannah: Yes, because they couldn’t just go to the grocery store. We’ve had our grocery chains, but this was not the case.

If you couldn’t go in your backyard and pick the olive crop or get the grain from the farmer next door, you were going to be starving.

Mary: Yes, and a lot of them were starving.

And then the final blow where it got even worse. They didn’t think it could get any worse, but then it got even worse where the livestock—“there were no sheep in the pen, no cattle in the stalls.”

So they were deprived. If there were no livestock, that not only deprived them of food—so they didn’t have food to eat—it also deprived them of their ability to produce food. So it would basically be like your whole production system—boom—gone. And your whole supply system, your whole supply chain is gone.

So this is a classic—and it’s figurative in a sense in that it’s not saying, “Oh, this is the exact situation.” It’s saying that when things go from bad to worse, when things look bleak, and then they become even worse . . . When you have a health issue, and then you find out it’s cancer, and then you find out you’ve got a month to live. It just gets worse and worse. This scenario gets worse and worse.

Even though you get dealt these harsh blows that you don’t think you can bear, even then—and this is where Habakkuk just counsels his own soul, as David did—“I will rejoice in the God of my salvation”—I’m going to do it.

Dannah: I choose it.

Mary: I choose it. No matter how bad it gets, I choose to trust in God.

That takes me back to the Elisabeth Elliot quote that we started this session off with, and that is that it is possible to be grateful. “It is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life.”

As we’ve been talking, Dannah, that in the Bible, the Bible’s perspective on gratitude is that it is a discipline. It is a lifestyle. It is a hard-fought lifestyle. It is so hard to fight for gratitude when we’re facing those bad-to-worse situations in our lives.

Dannah: It really is. And this year has certainly been a test.

But even as you unpacked that passage in Habakkuk, I’ve had some disappointments. I’ve had some inconveniences this year. But really, when you compare it to the list of what you just described in Habakkuk, I’ve got so much to be thankful for right now this year. I’ve been on my knees so much. And yet, I have so much to be grateful for.

Mary: One of the lessons we see in those verses is that Habakkuk was determined to focus on the bigness of God rather than the bigness of the problem.

Dannah: There you go!

Mary: Because God is bigger than any problem. He knew that even if the problem was unspeakably hard, that God was faithful to see him through.

It’s not easy to be grateful when we face a tough situation. It’s even harder to be grateful when things go from bad to worse, and when the problems pile up and just more and more and more. And when they seemingly have no end. That’s when it’s the most difficult to be grateful. It’s also the time that we need gratitude the most.

Dannah: You know, this year has really illuminated my weaknesses. I was living under the false pretense that I was in control of my life. I wouldn’t have said that I had that theology, but as God has stripped away things that made me comfortable, made me even powerful or strong—to some degree—I have been very aware of how weak I am.

How do I maintain gratefulness when I’m feeling out of control and weak?

Mary: I think what this year has done is it’s shown us that we really aren’t in control. Control is an illusion, and all of us are weak. And there’s something refining about that. There’s something purifying about that.

The apostle Paul actually spoke about that when he talked about really difficult times in his life. He said, “You know what? I take pleasure in weaknesses.” That didn’t mean he enjoyed it, but he basically said, “I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for weaknesses and insults and catastrophes and persecutions and pressures.”

Then he gave the reason. And this is in 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 9 and 10. “I’m grateful for all these things—all these hard, horrible things—for this reason: “Because of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (paraphrased).

In other words, “When I do not have the capacity to face this massive challenge, my Savior and my God will show that He does. He will show Himself to be strong in me even in the most horrible situation.”

And we’ve seen that in the lives of our friends. We have another friend, Kimberly Wagner, who’s been on Revive Our Hearts often. And she and LeRoy are walking through a terrible health situation with LeRoy.

Dannah: Yes. He has, what on the McGill Pain Index, is the most painful condition known to man. He is in chronic, constant nerve pain, debilitating at times.

Mary: Excruciating.

Dannah: All day long.

Mary: All the time—all the time.

Dannah: Can you imagine watching someone you love walk through that?

Mary: And Kimberly is walking through her own health issues as she tries to care for him. It’s a terribly difficult situation.

And yet, I look at this woman, and I go, “Wow!” She is someone who shows me the strength of Christ. She just exudes it. She would say that she feels very weak and very unable to face the challenges of her life and what LeRoy is going through. And yet, there’s this beautiful, sweet, sweet reliance on God and just the strength of God that strengthens her from day to day, from moment to moment.

Dannah: And that gratitude comes through in her texts. In our little group of friends, we text back and forth. She’ll just be like, “I’m so grateful that the doctors are looking for a solution.” (They haven’t found one. It’s been several years. They haven’t really found a good solution for it.) But she says, “I’m so grateful that the doctors are being faithful, and they’re still looking.”

And I’m going, “Oh, I don’t know if I could still be grateful for the doctors right now.” I think I might be looking at how the glass is half empty, but she’s still seeing the glass as half full in every little circumstance.

And you know what else, Mary? She is always praying for us. When we text back and forth, I’m, like, how are you praying for us? How are you noticing my small problems when you have these very big ones? On top of the health problems, they both are not able to work. He’s not able to work at all. She’s able to work far less. And she’s praying for me! That’s a grateful person.

Mary: That is a grateful person. We have the blessing and benefit of seeing so many friends of ours who are going through difficult things, and yet, who teach us how to be grateful.

When I see Kimberly, and when I see even Nancy, and when I see these friends of mine going through struggles, I go, “My struggles are so small, and yet I grumble, and they don’t.”

It is such a good reminder, actually. It’s a sharpening reminder that God gives us the ability to make that choice, to choose gratitude. Really, what we’re choosing when we choose gratitude is we are choosing Him. We are choosing to see how big He is and to be grateful for that.

Dannah: Yes. This kind of gratitude goes way beyond what we hear about and celebrate on Thanksgiving Day. It’s deeper than the whole, “Let’s go around the table and say something we’re thankful for.”

Mary: Dannah, as Nancy said, “Gratitude is a lifestyle. It is a hard-fought, grace-infused, biblical lifestyle.”

Dannah: Mary, tell me about a time when you had to fight hard for gratitude.

Mary: I had to fight hard for gratitude when I was actually hit with a kind of bad-to-worse circumstance. It was over a period of about two years where things went from bad to worse.

My son lost his hearing, so I was faced with having a special-needs child. I miscarried twins. I lost my babies. My other son ended up in the hospital with a severe staph infection. It was a grave situation. We could have lost him at that time. My husband’s appendix burst. Our church was having some crisis in terms of just church conflict. There was family conflict. The bottom fell out of my husband’s business, so there were financial pressures.

There was just every way I looked, every direction I looked, there were difficulties and hardships.

I remember at times of getting up in the morning, and it seemed so dark. And I’m not talking about a physical kind of dark. It does stay dark here in the winter for a long time in the morning, but that’s not the darkness I’m talking about. It was a darkness of my spirit where it was just dark, dark and heavy.

I remember sometimes I had to excuse myself from even the family and what was going on and to go into a room and get on my knees and beg the Lord to intercede and to give me the grace and to give me the strength and to give me the right kind of attitude to deal with the day. I had to do that repeatedly.

It was a fight. It was a struggle. It wasn’t just, “Oh, let’s just meditate on something really happy. This is a pretty flower, and I feel so happy now.”

It was the deepest, darkest, hardest, most excruciatingly painful trial. I was able to fight for gratitude and find it, and not because of anything in me, but only because of Jesus and because of His power and His strength and because I could be grateful in all things, always, because of Him.

Dannah: How did that impact the way you were able to live out those hard days?

Mary: It just enabled me to put one foot in front of the next. I can’t say that, “Oh, there was this amazing transformation,” because it was hard fought. And hard fought means step by step, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day.

It’s not like I all of a sudden had all kinds of strength where I could take on the next few months. It was, no, I received grace for when I needed it. That’s a quote I love. Nancy’s quote, “Grace infused.”

It’s like God put an IV into my arm, and when I needed the strength, He provided it. When I needed the gratitude, He provided it. When I pressed on the button, I got that infusion of what I needed. It was hard fought. It was extremely hard fought.

So if you are listening today and you can relate, if you are going through something that is so difficult and excruciatingly painful, and if you are facing a situation where things are going from bad to worse and you don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, I just want to encourage you to look to God and get your eyes off of the bigness of the problem and put them onto the bigness of God. Be grateful in your heart with praise and worship toward Him for who He is, and He will give you strength for the next step.

Dannah: Mary, I’m thinking of that verse from Philippians 4: “Do not be anxious about anything . . .” If we stop there, we would keep being anxious because we would still be thinking about the bigness of the problem. But it goes on to say, “. . . in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God” (v. 6 ESV).

Mary: That’s so interesting to me, isn’t it? We come with prayer and supplication. We’re taking our problems before Him. And yet, we forget that little phrase, “with thanksgiving.”

The gratitude is part of the supplication. The gratitude is part of being able to take all those heavy problems and laying them at the foot of the cross.

Dannah: Mary Kassian is going to be back to pray.

But first, I want to really encourage you: You do need to fill your mind with truth about gratitude.

When I’m in those dark seasons, I wake up, and I think, Lord, I just want to stick my head under the covers and stay in bed today. But I drag myself to my Bible. I drag myself to the Christian book I’m reading that will just prime the pump of gratitude in my life, and somehow—fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes later, I feel like I have enough strength to put one foot in front of the other.

Some of you need that strength right now. Can I say, before you turn to a book to find that, before you turn to Revive Our Hearts, turn to God. Turn to His Word. Soak yourself in His truth, and you might be surprised how much He will change your perspective.

But of course, other reminders can be helpful as well. That’s why our team chose the theme of gratitude for our 2025 wall calendar. Wherever you hang it—your kitchen, office, or, I don’t know, bedroom?—you’ll get a daily dose of “juice” to get your mind on God rather than your circumstances.

We’ll send you that calendar if you request it when you make a gift to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. When you do that, you’re helping us encourage hearts of gratitude in women all around the world, and the calendar is just a small way of saying thank you. You can make that donation at ReviveOurHearts.com, or by calling us at 1–800–569–5959. Again, that’s ReviveOurHearts.com, and ask for the 2025 wall calendar when you give.

Speaking of women all around the world, do you know anyone who would enjoy listening to Revive Our Hearts but who isn’t comfortable with English? Well, did you know that there is Revive Our Hearts content in many different languages? Over the years, many women who have heard Nancy’s teaching have thought, I need to translate this for my friends! And now we have whole teams that produce Revive Our Hearts in Spanish, German, Farsi, and other languages! You can find the whole list at ReviveOurHearts.com/international.

Well, I hope you have a great weekend and that you’re able to worship the Lord in fellowship with other believers. Then, be back Monday. We’ll continue talking about gratitude, this time with Nancy and Barbara Rainey.

Now, we realize that just because we said you can be grateful in hard times doesn’t mean that suddenly you are overflowing with thankfulness. So Mary, would you pray for our dear friends who need a little bit of help with the thanksgiving today?

Mary: Heavenly Father, I pray, Lord, that You will touch the woman who is crying out in her heart right now, saying, “This is me. I need help! I’m grumbly. I am resenting my circumstances. I don’t even know how I can choose to be grateful in this horrible situation.”

Father, I pray that she will be able to take her requests to You, that You may be able to minister to her as she lays out her burdens and her pain before You. And in everything, in her circumstance, with prayer and supplication, that she may bring that before You with gratitude and thanksgiving for who You are—not that she’s grateful for her circumstance, but she’s grateful for the God who’s big enough to see her through.

So, Father, I pray for her to have strength for today and strength to put the one foot in front of the next and to keep going and to hang on to You with hope and joy and with gratitude. In Jesus’ name, amen.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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