Many years ago, tossing in the fever soaked sheets of my bed on our island in remote S.E Asia, I had stumbled upon a rare and precious cure for the cancer of my heart.
My body was fighting yet another case of malaria and I had medication for that, but my heart was fighting discouragement and disillusionment, and it was spreading.
I stumbled upon a blog of a then “unknown” pig farmers wife. She told tales of her crippling anxiety crumbling away as she began a simple practice of gratitude. She had scribbled a collection of 1000 “gifts”, 1000 things she was thankful for…and it so transformed her life that her story became a book (One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp)
I began scribbling my own gratitudes, my own thanks…one by one,
~ Malaria medication
~ A fan
~ Electricity
~ Clean water
I found healing and joy in wringing out gratitude from the hard day,
~ Ben’s 105 degree fever broke…
~ A translucent blue butterfly in the trees of our jungle home…
But here I was 12 long years later. I had gone back to school in that time and walked the road to a Doctorate in Counseling. So many complex theories and methods were stored in my head. I was no longer in the S.E Asian jungle, I was sitting in a hard wooden chair a half hour from the Ukrainian border.
There was snow was falling outside the smudged windows of the camp meeting hall where 61 Ukrainian children were gathered who had been evacuated out of their homes only 2 weeks before. Their towns and villages were being mercilessly targeted by the Russian army.
The goal of this day was to find a routine for them. When the human brain has experienced trauma its first reaction is NOT to buckle down and be productive, none of them could focus well. Some had been doing variations of on-line school for three years at this point as the enemy of Covid had passed the baton to the war.
They were restless. The teenagers slumped in their chairs, the little ones nervously still rubbing sleep out of their eyes and scratching their heads (what we would later realize was an outbreak of lice in its stealthy infant stages).
Suddenly 20 or so cell phones shrieked an air raid siren from their hometown. It happened on cue, it seemed just as we gathered them together in the morning. What fragile attention we had won was shattered as their faces went somber and their minds scrambled to cope with a reality that they were not created to deal with. Not now in their young years. Not ever!
When was the last time you heard an air raid siren indicating your city was under threat of being bombed….again?
When was the last time you heard an air raid siren in your heart indicating your inner world was about to spin out of control….again?
I wondered if my simple tattered and tried prescription of giving thanks could even work in a place like this? I had seen it work for individuals…but a traumatized group of displaced children? During war?
Isn’t “giving thanks” a little “simple” and demeaning when some of them had lost parents to Russian tanks?
Nevertheless, I stood up and we began the morning gathering …and I proposed my “cure” for the grey feeling they all wore on their souls like an ill fitting coat.
They gave me “blank face”…my least favorite response! So I started in myself…a nervous swirl in my belly…so I could show them how simple it could be.
“Every morning we will try for 20 things”, I started in…
~ Sun
~Clean water
A little hand went up shyly
~ “The Ukrainian Army”?
Yes, dear one. What little girl of 6 feels most thankful for an Army?
Then another
~“The sausage this morning with our bread”…
And so it began.
They struggled through the first days to grasp the simplicity of gratitude. It seemed their thoughts and worries were so heavy that most had lost the ability to see if any good was still there.
But it began to flow.
4 weeks after we started the page for just one day was filled to the brim with 175 declarations of gratitude.
The prescription was working.
The war and hate still raged on in their cities, but the war in their hearts against discouragement and disillusionment was being won, one statement of thankfulness at a time.
What “war” are in you that has attacked your joy and peace and left you as a refugee in a place you didn’t ever want to be?
If a group of displaced Ukrainian children who are aching to believe their home and parents will still be there when the war ends can scribble out 175 statements of gratitude a day…maybe we should just join them?
I’ll start.
~ I am thankful for you dear reader.
~ I am thankful for the sausage this morning with my bread.
~ I am thankful for the sun.
