God and gratitude...a conversation with Don Truex and Scott Beyer

In this episode of Balancing the Christian Life, we talk about the importance of gratitude. Welcome to Balancing the Christian Life. I'm Dr Kenny Ambrie. Join me as we discover how to be better Christians and people in the digital age. Thank you. When did you learn to say that the first time? If you're anything like me, you probably can't really remember, but that simple phrase is often the introduction most people have to the idea of gratitude. The Bible uses some form of the word gratitude over 150 times, which should tell you something about this simple idea and how God values it. Likewise, this is a concept we focus on during this time of year. Thanksgiving focuses entirely on being grateful for people who have helped us. Don Truex is someone I've talked to on the podcast once before and he did an excellent job discussing leadership. I knew he would have an excellent take on gratitude. Don is an evangelist in Temple Terrace, Florida, where he has worked for over 30 years. Likewise, Scott Byer is no stranger to this podcast. He's been a good friend to me and the program. Scott hosts his own podcast, Love Better, and also serves as an evangelist in the Louisville area. I've talked to Scott before about his eight adoptions as well as how we fit dinosaurs into the Bible. So you know, Scott's recording quality isn't very good, but I think you can still understand him just fine. So let's start here, Don, we're often called to be a grateful people. Why? What's the benefit to being grateful all the time, Don Truex?

Gratitude obviously Honors God. It's an acknowledgement of what James said, that every good and perfect gift comes from the Father above. There is no variation with him. It causes us to think about his grace and about his mercy. Gratitude helps our perspective. It helps us appreciate the good in our lives, even in the face of difficulty and there is good to be found. Gratitude is good for us. Your study after study indicates that having a perspective of gratitude helps our well-being, of course, our happiness. Ultimately, it should draw us closer to God. But it can't be overlooked that gratitude is a command. Thankfulness is a command of God. And so we're commanded 1 Thessalonians 5 and 18, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God. And so there's a bottom line that this is part of God's will. And if we don't do God's will, then it's axiomatic, that would be a sin. But we don't treat it that way. If it's a sin, we treat it like it's a minor league sin, not a major league sin, like it really doesn't matter. But the fact of the matter is this is part of God's will for us, and anything that is for his will for us, according to Romans 12, of course, would be good. It'd be part of his good, perfect will. So clearly, from his perspective, this is for our good, pete Slauson.

Gratitude connects us to everything that is good in the character of God. He looked at who God is and he is always looking for the best in the worst. It's the message of the Bible. Is God, seeing human being doing the wrong thing, loving us anyways, somehow bringing something good out of dark things and being grateful people is part of that is looking at life and saying there's always something to be thankful for, there's always something good. Every first day of the week we bend time dwelling on Jesus and the cross. Now, when we're partaking of that memorial at the Lord's Supper, what is it? Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? Right? Is what the cross? An awful event? Yes, it's an awful event, but remember it gratefully because there's something good that came out of something really awful, and that paradigm shift is Christianity. So that's why we're told when you pray, always do so with Thanksgiving. There's always going to be things that you need to ask God to help you with. There's always going to be things that are wrong in this world that we need help with, but there's always going to be something to be grateful for. And if you lose that, there's this tie to, I think, between gratitude and hope. If you're not grateful people, you're not hopeful people. You can think about the Israelites and the wilderness and they're complaining and grumbling. They're the same people who said we can never go into the land, we can never make it. I think there's a tie there. When you complain and grumble and are always looking at the darkest side of thing, when you're called upon to be brave, to trust God, to know that things will work out, there's no hope there. A lack of gratitude destroys hope.

Gratitude- creates hope. So much of this is perspective, though, because when you think about some of the people that I appreciate the most usually have the most dire circumstances. They're giving a diagnosis that they never wanted in their lives, and the ones that impress me the most are the ones where a situation like that sparks the greatest amount of gratitude in them, and, from my perspective, I'm going how on earth can you do that? I don't get that, because if my life was suddenly cut short, I'm not sure that would make me grateful, and yet those are the people that I see among the most grateful. Why is that? True Gratitude doesn't change the external realities that happen around us, but why is gratitude one of those things that really changes our perspective and everybody else's perspective around us?

Well, I think if that is not the case, it would be soul crushing. We've all seen individuals whose perspective in life is negative, critical, complaining, and these are not happy people and clearly these are people who are not connected with God. Typically these are the people who look at God and they blame God for whatever they perceive their negative circumstance to be. The other end of that spectrum is somebody whom we knew and loved, like Matt Baskford, who has given that devastating diagnosis as a relatively young man, and yet he embraces that, and he embraces it from the perspective of gratitude for the life that God is allowed to live and gratitude for the hope that God placed in his heart and, as a result of that, his perspective I think we all look at and, as you say, it's inspirational. Just as complaining is contagious, so that kind of thankful, grateful, hopeful spirit is contagious as well.

Gratitude is a skill, not a talent, and talents you're just born with, gills are things that you work on. When people go through a difficult thing, some people choose to gain that skill and some people don't. And when you're in the crucible of hard times, that's where you will find yourself, working on that skill. Colossians 315 says let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. I think that peace of Christ and the being thankful, those are intrinsically tied. Thankful people have peace. They're able to see the bigger picture. But that's a choice. It's so hard when you're in the midst of something. Hold back so that you're not just staring at the thing that's directly in front of your nose. To look at it in a larger context, from a spiritual standpoint, as, like Don saying, it's soul crushing. If you don't hold back and look at it from the context of who Christ is and eternal thing, you will find yourself just looking at whatever dark benches in front of you, and a lot of people do that. That's why we say with life, you either get bitter or you get better. We have these cloak wheelisms to address that idea.

And there's a context for that as well. But when you are in that crucible, it does cause you to look at the bigger picture of your life. There is that issue that is right in front of you that you can't escape. That is real, that you have to navigate your way through. But it also gives you the bigger perspective of, for example, I have a family that is supporting me here and helping me here, and I have a church family that is rallying around me. These are my brothers and sisters, these are my fathers and mothers in the faith who are going to help me with this. It does help your perspective, not just for yourself, but that larger context of things that God has put into your life and for which you can be grateful, because they help you take that step by step as you get your way through, whatever the challenge is.

One of the things we didn't do here and I probably should have done this at the very beginning is if you're going to tell somebody, okay, you need to be grateful. What are you telling them to do? What are you telling them to be?

I would define gratitude as being thankful. So thankfulness is finding the thing to be thankful for, to give thanks for, to count up and say this is a good thing. The people with the skill of gratitude can find the good fruit in the barrel of bad fruit. That's what gratitude is just counting up the good, regardless of the percentage of it. In the circumstance it may be only 5% good and 95% bad, but you somehow still see the 5%.

It's a disposition of the soul that makes a deliberate decision to see the good and focus on the good, while not ignoring the reality of the bad. We're not asking people to have a polyana point of view here, but we are asking people to have a perspective about matters that oftentimes I think impetually. Older, senior saints who have navigated their way through a world war. They've gone through multiple other wars, they've gone through a depression, they've gone through recessions some of them are buried children. They've gone through all kinds of circumstances, yet their disposition for life is hopeful. How did that happen? It did not happen, even Simply naturally although some people do have a disposition more toward that, without doubt. But they've made a choice. They've made a choice that this is going to be the focus of their life.

And one of the things that this generation has been criticized for is the sense of entitlement that it has and I'm a college professor, I've been doing this a little while and I would probably concur. I do see in this generation a sense of this is what I deserve. And they often look to the previous generation and say I'm obviously going to be doing better by than my parents and I deserve better than my parents. One of the things that I worry about with this generation is I don't know that they recognize the sacrifices that their parents went through, nor the sacrifices generations before them have gone through. There is again that sense of entitlement that is antithetical to what it means to be grateful. And again, don't let me paint with a too broad a brush. I know as well as you do several people in this generation that could teach us all something about gratitude, but I do believe that there is a sense of entitlement that I think, frankly, it scares me and it makes me worried for this generation. Do you see what I'm saying? Do you agree? Do you disagree?

Oh yeah, entitlement has the word me in it, it's baked into it. It's all about me and what I deserve. And you're right, entitlements factor in the cost of things. Entitlement says this should just appear because I deserve it and it doesn't think about the cost for those things to happen. If you feel entitled to a certain wage, you aren't thinking about the business owner who's putting their neck on the line every day and enduring the risk to pay that wage. You don't think about the profit loss, you just think I deserve. When we move into that mentality and I'm thankfully that you said we're painting with a broad brush here, because I agree, I think the generation coming up I know some immensely grateful people within that generation but we have a marketing system that has really created the sense for young people that you deserve a better life than the generations before and doesn't talk about how we've gotten to where it is. And, yeah, gratitude is the opposite of saying I deserve it, instead saying look at how I got this through the sacrifices of others.

It goes beyond just young people. I think we ought to be honest about that, that the sense of entitlement that leads oftentimes to ingratitude. I think we ought to be honest about the fact that sometimes it's very difficult to be thankful for what we perceive as expected, what we believe that an individual or individuals ought to do naturally, or what we have paid for them to do, and if they don't meet our expectation about that it's very difficult to be thankful. A spouse oftentimes is not grateful for the faithfulness of their maid, or a parent not thankful for the obedience or the goodness of a child, or a child not grateful for the sacrificial love of a parent. Why? Well, because it's easy to develop a mind, so of course there's supposed to be those things, they're just supposed to do that, and so it's easy not to be thankful. We carry that into other setting. We expect a certain level of service when we go to a restaurant or into some other place, and if it's not net, we can immediately feel that we have been slighted. And so we don't do well with slights in this country. We don't do well with slights as Americans in our culture, and so it's very easy to be unthankful, ungrateful, to have a sense of ingratitude for things that we feel just. We should be right, have a right to expect.

Gratitude is one of those characteristics that we actually do have a lot of scientific research on. For example, the University of Kentucky says that people who are more grateful usually have less aggression. Applied psychology in a journal says that people who are more grateful sleep better. According to another study in 2012, it says that gratitude improves your physical health. This is one of those things where, yeah, it's a command of God, as you rightly point out, but it sounds like you're an idiot if you don't figure out how to be grateful in your life because you're unnecessarily making yourself suffer. Gratitude is all that great, and if we get so much benefit from it, why aren't more people doing?

it Because it's hard. Everybody understands that saving money and spending less than what you make is a good idea. Go pull people and say what should you do? Should you spend more than what you make or should you spend less than what you make? And everybody goes, oh, you should spend less than what you make. But why don't we all do it? Because it's hard. One of the case studies, I think, in the problem with gratitude is Jonah. You have this story of Jonah and the divides and we tend to emphasize the first part, with the big fish and all that. But the second part of the story is really the bigger issue. I think, yeah, and there's nothing there, waiting to see what God will do. And there's this plant that grows up and then when it dies, he just gets torqued. He's so angry about it and he's not thinking about the blessing that he had with the plant to start with. He's not thinking about the good thing, he's thinking about the bad thing. That happened next and that's exactly what he's thinking with the Ninevite is look, they repented. That that's not what I wanted. Not thinking about the fact that here's human beings who did what God said and that's a good thing. It's so easy to focus on the bad. If people give you a hundred compliments and then you get one criticism, which one are you going to remember? It's just the way we are as people, where we have a negative bias and there's been a lot of studies done on that too that you, as a human being, have a negative bias. You will lean toward it. It's also why, when news organizations are trying to get you to click and do the clickbait thing, what do they do? It's the bad news, right? It's not the puppies. It's not this person helping this other person. It's death and mayhem and massacre. It's what sells, because our brains immediately gravitate towards the train wreck, and so you got to train to do the opposite.

Yeah, you see that. You see that in things as simple as not just the clickbait on mine, but think about where we are as a nation, with the horrible political divide that we have among us. And so what do you have? You have two different perspectives, and in the especially in the far right and the far left news media, what is that? The sky is falling and somebody else's fall, and so the only way they can keep you coming back is to keep you upset.

Yeah.

And you're not grateful about this democracy in which we live and the freedoms we enjoy and the good things that we have there. Let's go back to Jonah for just a minute. Jonah was in fact torqued and, by the way, that's the new international buyer version.

That is a paraphrase.

That's not a direct translation, I don't know, but it's interesting that the only time in that book when Jonah is happy, the only time he's happy, is when that vine grows up and covers his head. His perspective is completely about himself and it's a very narcissistic point of view where he becomes the center and circumference of his world. And I think that's the answer primarily to your question, kenny why aren't more people grateful? Because in American culture we have transcended from a post-World War culture where there was a greater good. You served this nation, you served your fellow man, you served your family. It was really not about you, but it was about a greater good in all of those, in those three areas in particular. And we have evolved out of that into a culture that says no, everything is about you. Everything is about you and you being happy, you having what you want. This is all about you. To use Scott's financial example, why is it that the average American has $16,000 in credit card debt? Because he's been taught you should not have to deny yourself anything. You cannot be happy, you cannot be grateful and thankful with your circumstance as it is. You've got to change that to suit you, not what's best for your family or what's best for others.

I don't know any culture that extols the value of ingratitude. It is universally panned. Nobody likes the idea of gratitude. I guess one of the things that I would say, though, is this is like that situation where I recognize that I hate it and everybody else, but I don't know that I would recognize it in myself. When do we know that the person that is really the biggest defender is the one that's actually looking in our mirror?

Yeah, that's the difficult issue of introspection. It's one of the reasons that we're called to examine ourselves, to look at that guy in the mirror, because it's so much easier to be upset at somebody else. I cut somebody off in traffic and it wasn't my fault. I was forced into it, I was in a hurry, he cut me off and I cannot believe that guy would do that. That's just true across the board and at the dawn's point. This is the nature of our culture, in me first in everything. And it goes back to that prayer of the Pharisee in the temple of Luke 18. What does he do? He prays. He prayed within himself, to himself. He wasn't even praying to God, but here's this guy saying I'm glad that I'm not like this guy. The only kind of gratitude that Pharisee had when he's praying in the tech collectors praying, the only gratitude he had was so self-centric. I see the best in me and I see the worst in others. Pivot that. Pivot being highly suspicious of yourself and assume the best of others, and there's some balance there. There's going to have to come a point where you're going to have to back off the suspicion of yourself. I know people who get down on themselves too much, but by and large, I think all of us could use a little bit of suspicion about our own motives and maybe be a little bit more critical of our own behavior and a little less of others. So, exactly what Jesus said you've got to take care of the log in your own life before you can address the splinter in your brother's eye.

It's a tremendous challenge. If you ask a person you say are you an ungrateful person? What do they go do? They're going to say, of course not, of course not. I'm thankful for many things. So I don't think we're going to see that in ourselves. It's going to take somebody whom we trust and who loves us, who can be honest with us. For many of us, that's our mate. For men, that's their wives, who say you know what? You need to think about this another way. You need to see this differently. You need to be grateful for what you do have instead of what you don't. But it takes somebody. It's very difficult for us to do that by ourselves because, again, we're not trained to do that. There's so many factors that have played into that, not the least of which, anymore, is social media. We're basically this whole idea of don't let your left hand know what your right hand's doing. That got thrown out the window with social media. We want everybody to know what both our hands are doing. We want you to appreciate it and applaud it. It feeds into this idea of I'm pretty special. I'm pretty special here, rather than being humbly grateful that opportunities are given to us.

Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with that at all. I read a book club that I've gotten in town with Edwin Crozier. We read a book called Extreme Ownership by Jack O'Welland. Have you read it? Yeah, good book. Yeah, it falls into a pattern. But one of the things that he talks about is, if you're looking for other people to blame, you usually find them. But if you decide that I'm just going to shoulder the blame, really, whether I deserve it or not, I'm just going to control so much of what I have control of that I'm just going to make anybody else's decisions irrelevant that if something went really badly, I should have seen that it would have gone badly. On one hand, it sounds extreme. Again, the name of the book is Extreme Ownership. By the other token, it puts you in a mindset that I really appreciate, which is that's not your fault, that's mine. I'm going to have to take control of that. Let's face it my kids they're immature. I should have recognized that they probably didn't have the maturity to make a decision like this. Did they make the wrong decision? Of course they did. They're 15. Of course they're going to make a wrong decision. I'm 54. I should have seen that coming. I think that's one of the things I really appreciate about that mentality. I see exactly what you talk about, byer, because you can take that to an extreme where you just got the whole weight of the world on your shoulders and a lot of things are outside of your control. Where do we?

draw the line. I'm going to turn to wisdom first on that. It's true, you didn't have to draw a line, but how to do that, I think, is a very difficult thing.

I think it's a very individual thing. It's going to depend on your life experience and your circumstance. It's going to depend on what is inside you and what your perspective about matters is. That kind of balance is a challenge for all of us, I think, to understand what we can control and what we can't control, and to know where that line is. I don't have a magic formula for that, kenny. If you develop one, I want you to share it with me.

I've been teaching in the auditorium class the book of Luke and we just finished up the crucifixion of Jesus. One of the questions that I asked the class was this was the crucifixion preventable? I think on one sense, if Judas had made a different decision, if the Pharisees inscribed scribes, had a better sense of what the kingdom was, if they were more honest with their relationship with God, would Jesus have been able to be spared the cross? I don't know that it's possible because the Pharisees and scribes were who they were. I think also the way that God hardened Pharaoh's heart was he didn't ask just to have the children of Israel released. He asked them to have the children of Israel released so that they could worship God. And who did Pharaoh think he was? He thought he was the God of the Israelites. He thought he was the God that they should be worshiping. And what does that do to somebody's ego when the very thing that they're asking is Look, your Godship not that important. They're not all that important? Of course it's going to harden your heart when you get to that idea of how much is this my responsibility and see if you guys agree with this. You're welcome to disagree if you want. I think there's a sense in which you understand the people that are around you and you understand their limitations and you have to start making allowance for their limitations. When you have that kind of insight, it's not their fault anymore, it's yours, because you knew what was going to happen. Do you see what I'm saying and do you see why I'm saying it, and do you agree?

And I'm not even sure we may be using the wrong word in trying to assign blame and fault. It's not necessarily always about finding fault. It's more about figuring out how to be grateful in all circumstances. I think the way that, if you look at, there's a pattern in the way that Paul writes his letters, and so you see it. If you look at Paul's letters over and over again, they tend to begin with Thanksgiving for the people and they tend to end with it. Even when speaking to the Corinthians, even when he's speaking to Galatians, there is a tendency for him to find somewhere to give thanks. Now, the Galatian letter is interesting because it tells you how bad it was that he actually doesn't start with thanks there. He ends with some. But the fact is that he's dealing with immature people who there is stuff they're doing wrong, there are things to blame them for, and Paul doesn't say oh, it's my fault, it's not your fault, no, it's their fault. But he does see in them good worth working with. And so there is that disposition that Don's talking about. Gratitude is a disposition, it's a way of looking at the world. Can you look at a guy like Peter and say there's something to work with there Jesus did. I'm not sure I would. I think I would throw that fish back. Right, I would have thrown it on. I think we'll call some of these other guys to follow me, but maybe leave that guy at the boat. We had a disposition to see good in somebody who had a lot of immaturity, and I think your example with kids is a good one. And this is also why we have a spouse, because sometimes I know for me with my kids, it's obvious why are you not doing this right? And I have a wife who just the other day had to say hey, they're learning, they're not bad kids. You can get the wrong perspective. They do something wrong and you label them as wrong. And there's the difference. Right, yeah, they did a thing that's wrong, but they're good and we need people to help us with that. And part of being people of gratitude is couching. Even when we're having conflict, couching it within the realm of Thanksgiving.

And if we don't do that, kenny, if we don't do that, think about it as absolutely miserable. If we view everybody in our world our mate, our children, our brethren if we view them and we are only looking for the things that we believe that they have failed in or that we perceive that they should have done something differently, instead of looking at them with gratitude for the good that is there inherently and appreciating that, we're going to be absolutely miserable if that's going to be our perspective. You work with young people in a college setting and I have interns. I've had so many interns through the years and, just as Scott is suggesting, I have to remind myself sometimes these are 18, 19, 20 year old kids, right, and so they're not going to do everything as they should. The decisions they make will not be exactly as they ought to be, but they're in that program, they're my intern because I can see so much good in them and I've got to keep that big picture. If we don't do that with our family, with our church family, with our world, we're going to be miserable. Why are so many people miserable in our world right now? Because all they can see are the problems, and there are many. That's not to minimize that, but that's what they're focused on, and so they spend their life upset about that, instead of seeing the good that is in life here.

Yeah, I think all of us are parents. Scott is a parent like 40 times over that number gets bigger every time you say it.

I found eight kids. That's not that many.

It's twice as many as mine.

There's a reason. There's a reason why the TV show was called Eight Is Enough.

He dated all three of us with that one.

Oh man, oh my goodness.

One of the things that I would say is I do think I talk about this example a lot that I often see in my children a bad decision and not a bad kid. And that's an important distinction for me to see, because if I just saw a bad kid, I've got a problem and I sort of hope that God sees me the same way, that that's a bad decision for Kenny to make, but he's ultimately not a bad guy. And, as Don said, I work with 18 to 22-year-olds for a long time. I've done that for a long time and I just watch these kids in a classroom pontificate about how the world is going to be and I just think, oh, you have no idea. You have no idea what the world is going to be like, and bless your heart for making these stands right now. But one of the things those stands will definitely as soon as you need to fix a broken-down car and you don't have any money in the bank, as soon as you have a child that gets sick and you are in desperate situation, your worldview just changes. There's just things that you cannot prepare for and you cannot tell other people about, but everything changes and it's just the perspective that you have, which I think we've come down to in a lot of ways. Gratitude is a perspective you have. It doesn't change the externalities, but it's just the perspective that you have on the world. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that is it, that is it exactly.

Don touched on it earlier. I think one thing that's really important to emphasize this it's not a polyana worldview either. It's not bad, things don't happen, it's all good. It's an emphasis and a perspective to see the good. But it doesn't mean that you let your brain fall out the back of your head and you don't recognize that there are hard times. It doesn't mean that when you go through something difficult you don't have grief and I'm just going to bottle up and just be cheerful. That's not at all what we're saying. It's processing hard things through a disposition of hope, I think, is part of it, and you can still have joy when happiness isn't happening. That's the part that Thanksgiving brain right is? It reminds you it's not all bad and it probably won't always be the way it is right now. It may be a hard season.

It is always going to be that way. To a degree, nobody gets out of life unscathed, and the fact of the matter is that, again, it's a matter of perspective. You can find something every single day about which to complain or be critical. You can find something every single day for which to be grateful. Again, it's a matter of choice and perspective. I think God just says look, I need you to have a better choice, I need you to have a better perspective. I need you to have a perspective that appreciates the world that I've given you and the opportunities come your way and the fact that, come what may, you have some things that are built in for you, not the least of which is his promise of his presence.

I've been doing a series and Byer was on one of these where we're just talking about the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5. The more I look at those, the more I think you cannot disentangle one from the other. You talked about gratitude, and really from gratitude. You talked about joy and to a certain extent you've touched on the idea of peace and forbearance and being kind and goodness. They just all seemed like they end up being the same thing, just with different names.

Yeah, they're interwoven. They are different, but they're intrinsically tied together, and that's the way it ought to be. I think there is a sense in which all the character traits that God wants for us to have are meant to weave together into one life.

Yeah, absolutely. There's a reason why it is the fruit of the spirit. They are, in fact, in meshed one with the other. What happens?

if you figure out that gratitude is not your strength, what are some just real, practical suggestions to make yourself more?

grateful. Don touch on one of them. Get a friend who will tell you a knucklehead. That's step one right. Get somebody you trust who's good at it. This is true in everything. Find somebody who's good at what you're not good at. Buy them a cup of coffee and let them tear you apart a little bit, in a loving way. But there's another thing that you can do. You can get a gratitude journal, and it's not a bad way to do that. We're supposed to pray without ceasing and include Thanksgiving in all of our prayers. There's nothing wrong with sitting down and making a list of the things you're grateful for before you pray, and it may feel a little contrived to start with.

And that's because you're not good at it.

You're not good at it to start with, and then one day it doesn't feel contrived, it doesn't feel mechanical, it just becomes a part of it. Sitting down and get yourself a little book and just write down. Before I pray. Every day I'm going to write five things that I'm thankful for. These are small things that you can do to start building that.

I think, kenny, one of the great inhibitors of true and genuine gratitude and thankfulness is when we can find our world and when our world shrinks so that it's just us. It just feeds that. It just feeds on itself in that way. And so Scott mentioned go get a cup of coffee with somebody. I've got to tell you, I've wanted to say to a lot of guys look, get off social media and go drink a coffee, a cup of coffee with somebody who has some life experience, who can share with you, where you're not the one who's pontificating about whatever the subject of the day is, but somebody who can actually share life experience with you, perspective with you, challenges and difficulties that they've gone through with you, that you can learn from them. I think that helps open up your world in such an amazing way. God puts people in our lives for a reason. They're not just so that we can talk to them. We need to make sure the communication goes the other way as well. And I'd say, if you want to be a grateful, thankful person, not only do we need to listen to others, but put your life into life with somebody else. Do something where the gift that you're giving is you. You're giving somebody the gift of time and the gift of friendship, the gift of love, the gift of caring, the gift of compassion toward them, because when you do that, you're going to develop a greater appreciation for other people and that will certainly make you much more grateful and thankful Again. We tend to spend time in. One of the things that's happened in America is there's a Stephen Wright the comedian as a whole skit about, not Stephen Wright, who am I?

thinking of.

I don't know. I'm old, I can't remember, but he has a whole deal about. When we were kids, growing up, people would come to our house. They'd knock on the door, come in, we weren't expecting them, it was great and exciting. And now somebody knocks on our door and scares us to death. Who's knocking on our door? We tend to live these close lives now and it allows for this kind of feeding on itself where it's about us and nobody else.

There is a double-edged sword one of the things that I'm a cheerleader for technology. If it were not for this kind of platform, there's no way I would know Scott Byer that our paths do not cross. But I'm so grateful that I do know Scott Byer because he's a good guy and I have basically thrown him into my path a few times and I tend to be better off when that happens. But I could say that about dozens of people, and I think one of the things that you're talking about there, don, is intentionally doing something where you don't know the outcome, but you know that you're going to be better off because you did it, and I think that's a One of the things and let me speak in favor of technology that I really appreciate. If there's somebody who you just think is a fabulous, anybody who does a great job of walking the Christian walk, you now have 10,000 different ways to get a hold of that person and tell them that. And if you want just a really simple way to start your journey of being grateful, tell them thank you, because I am so grateful. I realize social media has been used to some really negative effects, but if you think Don Truex is just the bees and the ease, and there's an old saying for you there. Don I bet you that you.

I heard it from my grandmother. Thank you.

I bet you, don, would be thrilled to hear that you appreciated something that he did. And I'd say, all of us are like that and I love the idea that we now have the ability to shrink the nation and the world in such a way that we can actually reach out to people that have meant something to us. Do you see what I'm saying there?

Yeah, but you're using digital technology as a two-way communication street with real people. What oftentimes happens with social media is I use it as a mouthpiece but I never listen. God gave you two ears and one mouthpiece. Accordingly, and that is the problem is when we aren't listening or we're not listening to actual people. If you scroll on Instagram and all you're seeing is all these kind of pictures of the best highlight reel moments of people's life, those aren't real people either. That was a snapshot in time. That's not real. But when you use it the way, frankly, you do a great job of this, kenny of you really connect with actual people and grow and allow their voices to shape you and then use their voices to help them shape the world. Hopefully, too, that's good. It's not the technology, it's the way we're using it. We use it to continue to isolate ourselves and create an echo chamber. When we do that, it's awful.

That's true. I want to go back to something Kenny said just a moment ago about expressing gratitude, and the fact of the matter is that everybody, if you've lived very long at all, you have a person or people in your lives to whom you can legitimately express gratitude and thanksgiving because they have helped you become the person that you are and it is. If you want a good start place for becoming a person of gratitude, just identify that and thank that person that stuck with you and believed in you during a difficult time. Thank that person who poured their life into you when it would have been easier for them not to have done. Look where you are today and identify those people who helped you reach that point and encouraged you. We've all got those people. We've all got those people. And if you need to begin somewhere, just look around your church family. Just look around your church family and begin with some senior saints who, just by their example, are inspirational and express gratitude and thanks there, those little simple things Scott talked about writing those things down. That's a wonderful beginning. The little thing of just learning to express something verbally to somebody else, where you're expressing gratitude for what they've done with no expectation of anything in return. It's a wonderful place to begin, I would add to that.

Another area you can do that is in worship. The amount of time the Psalms say, oh, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, enter his courts with Thanksgiving. Worship is a form of thing, it is a form of gratitude. Now, if you're doing it by road, where you just sit down and pee and you think because you know all the words and you just disengage your brain, it's not going to work. But if you are intentional about worship, that you are furious about the idea that when you go to be with the saint, you are going to worship God and you're going to think about the words that you are praying and you're going to think about the words that you're singing, that will make you a more grateful person. Worship will make you more grateful, intentional worship will, intentional worship, absolutely, absolutely.

You guys have both lived a few years. To whom are you grateful?

That's a long list. There are some obvious answers to that, kenny. Obviously, I'm grateful for my family and I'm grateful for the things that my family has contributed to me and that I've learned from my family. I'm extraordinarily grateful for my church family. I've had the same church family for almost 30 years now Wow, and it has blessed my life in more ways than I can begin to enumerate. I am beyond grateful and thankful for them, for shepherds who shepherd my soul, who are concerned about my soul, for teachers from whom I have learned over the past many years, for countless individuals in our church family, just as in your church family, who offer a cup of cold water, who do what they can, who find a way to be of service and make a difference for good. I'm extraordinarily thankful for that. I'm very thankful for friends in my life, most preachers. I have a cadre of preacher friends who are my iron sharpens, iron people, and they have made me better. They've made me a better preacher. They may be a better person. They've just made me a better Christian. I am extraordinarily grateful for them. But I would tell you, as a preacher, I'm extraordinarily grateful for men in the past. I stand on the shoulder of giants, the men of my father's generation, the generation before that. They paved the way. They made excruciating sacrifices that I have not had to make in order to be able to preach the gospel. They sacrificed in so many ways and they did their work in circumstances that were much, much more difficult than I've had to navigate and endure. I'm extraordinarily thankful and grateful for them. So that list just goes on and on. And that's another thing that, if you think about it, with what we've talked about, every person has those people If they'll just open their eyes and see them.

Yeah, and the problem with that question is that it's such a big one when I think about my wife and how she has stuck with me through all the years and all my foolishness and Amen, amen.

Are you amenning your?

foolishness or mine, yours Go ahead. I'm grateful for my kids and the blessing that they are I'm grateful for because of the adoption journey that has been involved, with so many of my kids coming home. I can literally say that there have been thousands and thousands of dollars that unnamed people I don't even know their names of many of them that donated so that my kids could come home. My family doesn't exist without the love of other people, and they're great. I too have been blessed with so many older preachers that had put up with me being a knucklehead and just bore with me through the season of which I think is very normal with young preachers of I knew everything until I realized I knew nothing, and they put up with me and they were patient with me and they mentored me. And I still have many preachers that I can call on at any moment and just say hey, I'm trying to figure out and navigate this. What do you think that iron chirpen lion? The saints have been so good to me. I'll give you an example, just one of innumerable examples. Had a rough day a week or so ago. It's just a lot of different things that had me questioning In my darker moments what am I even doing? Why am I even preaching? And that same evening of the same day that had just been a rarotten day, I'm holding a meeting and Christians from my home congregation traveled a distance to be there to hear sermons I had preached before to them, so they already have heard these sermons that just came to support me and I can't tell you what good that did. And my life has been full of things like that, just full of people whom the Lord had put in my light at just the right moment to give that cup of cold water. And I think that's the thing is, when you start counting up the people and forget about the things that we live in the first old country and all that kind of stuff. Those are all great, but and the people? It is all about the people and they are, by and large, the people that you will have in your life are going to be a blessing, just wonderful.

Yeah, exactly, I had an occasion just not very long ago if again I was sitting in a friend's house and there were some people from around the country, was one of the occasions at the college down the street from where I preached, that it brought a lot of people into town. And so we're sitting in a friend's house and we have friends from around the country and we're all sitting around this table and they're all talking and I just pushed my chair back a foot or two and just looked around the table and I thought to myself these are people who have enriched my life for literally decades and these are people that, regardless of how dark or horrible the circumstance was, I could pick up the phone and I know that they would drop anything in the world to come and be of help to me if they possibly could. So how do you possibly thank God adequately for that and how do you possibly thank those people for being that kind of influence and person and help in your life and what that means to you? It's just, it's invaluable, and if that doesn't engender some gratitude in you, then something is fundamentally wrong.

Let me ask this, and I think I know what the answer is going to be, but can you think of somebody who thanked you for something that just really stood out?

Yes, surprisingly, though, what I would say is that the times where somebody has shown gratitude to me and said something, where they were expressing things, it was really like the small thing that you hold a meeting and some kid comes up and they've got this drawing that they've done of your sermon and you could just tell they were paying attention and they were and they wanted to let you know Thank you for coming those things are just really touching. It's not so much the large acts although there are large acts of gratitude that people do as well but I think a lot of times it's the little things that just happen to hit at just the right moment, and something about kids in particular that there's just no guy all there so it's their innocence really makes the gratitude extra special.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. As a preacher, you remember certain things, particularly with young people of Scott's. Young people make a huge impact on you. We have a young lady at Temple Terrace that we were there when she was born and she is now graduated from college and she is working on her own. But her mom told me not long ago. Her mom told me she said she called her name. She said she told me. She said Mr Don is the only preacher I've ever had and she said that's right. And she said that's really cool and I'm really thankful for that. I can't tell you what that means to me. That's just an amazing thing to hear. And then there are larger things where things do that I will never, ever forget. I'll never forget. After I'd been at Temple Terrace for 25 years that, unbeknownst to me I had no idea this was being done All the elders and deacons and their wives they surprised, vicking me with a dinner, but they'd had virtually every member of our congregation write a note to me about those 25 years and I will. I can't even begin to put into words what that means to me and how grateful I am that God's given me that opportunity and that place with those people and again. But that doesn't move your heart, if that doesn't touch you, if it doesn't engender gratitude in you, then something's terribly wrong.

I can think of students who have come back and said thank you for a class that I taught, or having them in class and it does feel good. But I got to tell you one of the things that, on the opposite end of this, I think expressing gratitude is so much more important for me than receiving it, because I think one of the things that happens when you are truly grateful it puts you in a position that's not all that exalted. It makes you recognize how insignificant you are and how that's really a very good thing. Did you see what I'm saying?

Oh yeah, yeah, Expressing gratitude is a character developer.

Yeah, I think about my grandfather, who's been dead now for 20 years, but he had a blue collar job. He never made much money, but he taught me so many lessons. He was this guy. If you were to ask him what time it was, he'd tell you how to build a watch, and he couldn't give a short answer. But he was really good with his hands and he was. Whenever I think of a decent man, it's my grandfather that I'm thinking about, because I'm grateful that I'm his grandchild, I'm grateful to be connected to him. That makes me feel something great. I know I said things that were very kind to my grandfather, but it's more important to me that I recognize and express that gratitude to him.

Yeah, I certainly understand what you're saying, kenny, and I think that is exactly true. There's one other side of expressing gratitude that I think probably deserves that merits at least being mentioned, and that is one of the ways that we express gratitude to God is not merely by what we verbalize to him or, as Scott pointed out, in the way that we intentionally worship on the Lord's Day, but one of the ways that we express gratitude to God is by how we treat the blessings that he's given us, how we honor Him by honoring what he's done for us. I think about my father-in-law, for example. He passed away several years ago, but before he passed he had a heart transplant. He had a heart transplant at Vanderbilt in Nashville and then he lived 20 years with a transplant at heart, which was amazing. So he received the heart of a 14-year-old boy who had been tragically killed in an accident, and that boy's parents had the presence of mind to donate his organs, which just is an amazing thing in itself. But I think about that If you were the recipient of a heart that gave you life that was the gift that gave you life how would you say thank you to that family for that gift? Well, you would do that by taking care of the gift. And so if you started smoking, if you didn't take care of yourself, if you abused that heart, you wouldn't be showing adequate gratitude and thankfulness for it. And if you think about the fact that God's given us a new heart spiritually, and he's given us life, how do we say thank you to Him for that? Well, we need to take care of that. We need to respect and honor that gift, this day that God's given us. When the psalmist said this is the day the Lord has made, I'll rejoice and be glad. I know there's a context there. But if you think about from the concept of okay, god gave us this day, he renewed His mercies to us today. So how do I say thank you to God for that? Well, I got to do something meaningful with this day. I got to use this day in a way. God gives us children, he gives us children, and I wonder how many times a parent has said God, thank you for my children. And God's wanted to say really Seriously, because I don't see you taking very good care of them, at least not spiritually. And so there's the other side of expressing thanks, that it's not just words. It needs to be in very tangible, meaningful ways that show that we appreciate whatever goodness or kindness has come our way.

What did I miss?

I want to say one thing in answer to that, Kenan, because I know that's the way you end your podcast. When I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about this early this morning. I think it's important. I thought about three things in regard to this business of gratitude and thankfulness. On the one hand, I think we should not be afraid to call bad things bad. The fact of the matter is that there are some things that are lacking in life and need to be at rest, and so we shouldn't be afraid to call bad things bad. And to do that doesn't mean that we're not grateful or thankful people. That means that sometimes we have to be honest about our circumstances. But having said that, secondly, I think we need to be very careful not to and I'm going to make up a word here we need to be careful not to catastrophize life. We need to make sure that we're not a person who derives pleasure from their problems, who sees life through negative eyes. We've all met people like that that, no matter how lovely their home, how wonderful their family, how numerous their friends, how great their country, how terrific their church, they can always find something to complain about. We've got to be careful that we don't become people like that. And then, third, we've got to make sure that people who are like that don't keep us from doing what is right and being the grateful, thankful people that God causes us, calls us to be, and so, as we said at the beginning, it's a disposition of spirit that we choose, and so we can't allow others to stand in the way of our being the people that we ultimately need to be. Think about Jesus. Nobody was ever criticized more than he was right. You don't observe the Sabbath correctly, you don't wash your hands properly before you eat, you're too liberal for the Gentiles, you're too conservative about other matters. And yet he was a man who lived this business of gratitude and thankfulness and, as Scott has pointed out, just inherent joy in the life that he lived despite circumstances. So that would be my ending thought there, kenny.

I end all of my podcasts with be good and do good. What's good about gratitude?

What's good about gratitude is that it lets you interact and be God. You haven't talked about it, but in Luke 17, you have the story of the 10 lepers, which it the epitome of gratitude. Jesus heals 10 lepers, but only one comes back and he even calls it out. He says did last year, 10 were the other nine. What we forget is that gratitude made the difference for that one, so that he didn't just have a healing from his physical circumstances, but he got an interaction with the Spirit, the Son of God. Gratitude connects you to your Creator. Without it, you can have all sorts of good things happen to you, but you'll miss the one from whom all those good things come.

Yeah, what he said.

All right, I appreciate this. Thank you so much for doing this. This was a lot more fun than it should have been, so I appreciate you all doing this Always. Appreciate you, kenny, thank you. Thank you, fire. Thanks man. There's a lot in this conversation to love. I appreciate how they defined what gratitude is. I also appreciate how they both talked about the value of gratitude and how it really helps us, and some practical applications of how to implement gratitude into your life more. I don't think we're often very good judges of if we're very grateful or not. I think all of us want to be. I think all of us have a self-conception that we are, but this is one of those areas that if you can't speak for yourself, then I'll speak for myself. I know I could be better at this. I know I could be more grateful. I know I could express my gratitude to others on more occasions and be more sincere about it. Let me very sincerely say, don Scott, thank you very much. This was very helpful for me. As for the good thing I'm thinking about, well, I feel like I'm getting back to my old self again, just a little bit. This is, of course, the second episode that I've put out on a timely basis, and that's a big deal for me. I've said many times that this is something that I sincerely enjoyed doing, and I hope that you know anytime that I skip an episode or skip even a month, like I have. Well, there's something going on that made me do that. I certainly enjoy having these conversations. I enjoy thinking about God's word with you. I am somebody who definitely wants to be a Christian and I'm under no delusion to think that I have gotten it all right or that I am as good as even I want to be much less as good as God wants me to be. The Christianity is not a hobby. Christianity is my passion. So I'm grateful for these conversations to make at least me think a little bit more deeply about Christianity and how to do it. I also want to express some very sincere gratitude to you. Many of you have asked about what's going on with me. I've shared that with those of you who have asked. It's just been difficult, but, that said, I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Pray for me, I would appreciate it. So until next time, let's be good and do good.