I have been meditating on the idea of joy, gratefulness, happiness, as well as the inverse of these things. I find it quite easy to be miserable. If there is one temptation in my life that is stronger than all others it is the temptation to be sad. I find that sadness will often come first followed by the reasons for it as if it lays in wait for opportune moments and grasps even the most fragile of reasons to pounce.

Today I read 1 Thessalonians 5:18 which says:

"…give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus."

To be honest I struggle with this verse. I struggle with it for many reasons but one in particular – it is not advice; it is not a suggestion; it is God’s will and therefore it is a command upon our lives. We cannot read the text any other way. We must as followers of Christ first and foremost be obedient to the will of God but not in a simplistic follow-the-rules kind of way. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote:

"Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand – from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem" ‘How can I be good?’ and ‘How can I do something good?’ Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: ‘What is the will of God?’"

So then the challenge is to give thanks in all circumstances out of a deep and heartfelt desire to obey the will of God and not in the pharisaic sense that it is one of 600 plus rules one must obey to be "good" in the eyes of God. This is not to suggest that one is not to be sad…rather it is to command that even in the greatest depths of our dark days we have the unbridled desire to still give thanks. Even further then being aware of his will and assenting to it, as with all things God asks of us, is to go beyond a ‘feeling’ of thankfulness and actively demonstrate the attitude in our lives; in how we live and relate to one-another.

To give thanks in the midst of financial well-being, or what we perceive as blessedness (which usually is defined as "getting what I want") is not a struggle although ironically we often forget. The challenge is to be able to give genuine thanks in the midst of ALL circumstances; in the midst of suffering and sadness; in the midst of hardship and trial; in the midst of loss and adversity…we must give thanks.

It is not only because we seek to do the will of God that we should give thanks (although surely this should be enough) but for another quite critical reason that once again Bonhoeffer expresses so well:

"Always give thanks in all things. Everything we cannot thank God for, we reproach him for."

What we cannot be thankful for we resent. We cannot be obedient to the will of one we ultimately resent. We are painfully aware of the burden of evil in this world and the demands it places upon our lives. It demands our misery; it demands service in sadness; it demands our enslavement to brokeness. But we must always remember that the evil of this world is not the world’s true reality. Evil is a nightmare that has overlaid this world like a cloud. The reality of this world is that it is in fact the good creation of God. That we in fact are good creations of God. So good that God would condescend to enter it and become one of us for the sake of the world.

In this and in so many other things we can find the strength to give thanks because one day and in fact even now the nightmare is ending…the sleeper is awakening and finds the true nature of themselves and the world to be what it was created as – good.