SPIRIT

Cookie Dribbling

You have had it happen to you, too. Maybe it wasn’t the same circumstance, but you will recognize this: The kind, older lady gives your little Johnny two cookies, and he immediately stuffs one in his mouth and holds out his hand for another. You bend down, look him in the eyes, and say, “Tell the nice lady ‘thank you’.” He screws up his face, dribbling cookie from the corner of his mouth, and turns away from both of you grunting “no.” You are embarrassed, the kind lady is embarrassed, and your child just ate the second cookie.

What parent wants their child to grow into a thankless person?

In all my life, I don’t think I have met a parent who did. We’ve all been in places where the whining and complaining of an ungrateful child assaulted our ears and increased our blood pressure. So, exactly how do we help our children learn to be thankful for the good things they enjoy day to day, not just at birthdays and Christmas when their “Santa’s List” has been fulfilled? How do we teach our children to be thankful, not just to kind ladies but during life’s tough times?

The key to teaching thankfulness may not be in the words you use or in the behavior you reinforce, but in the model you display. As a parent today, it is not difficult to slip into the realm of thanklessness. We easily become those who have expectations that must be met. If an expectation is met, then all is good, but we are not necessarily thankful. Our children are even required to meet our expectations. When we catch ourselves thinking that way, we have failed to display thankful hearts to them. I think parents fall into what I call the Buddy Hackett trap. Buddy said, “As a child, my family’s menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.” With that kind of attitude, our children will never learn how to have truly thankful hearts.

I have a great and meaningful photograph of my son, who is married and now has a child of his own. In the photo, he is wearing my boots, hat, and camouflage coat and holding a Tinker toy shotgun he made. He was imitating me, an avid hunter. Children love to imitate their parents, at least at an early age. What are your little ones imitating?

Centuries ago, Jesus had an encounter with 10 lepers that strikes at the heart of thankfulness. Jesus healed 10 lepers of their leprosy.

Of the 10, only one returned to thank Jesus for healing him. Maybe you don’t feel the impact of the whole story because leprosy is almost nonexistent today. In the first century, a leper was in a miserable condition with a dreadful disease that cut him off from all human contact. The instantaneous healing these men received certainly should have made them thankful beyond measure. We can even suppose that if someone with a heart as hard as Adolf Hitler’s had been one of those 10 lepers who were healed, even he would have been thankful. Nine were thankless and one returned to thank Jesus. The Gospel of Luke records it this way: “Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks.”

Our children are exposed to the thanklessness of our world in so many places — school, the playground, on the sports field, and just out and about with us. If we as parents, and even grandparents, can learn to live before our children with an attitude of genuine gratefulness for all things in life, then our children will become our imitators. An easy mistake to make in our modern day is to fail to be thankful for the small things in life as much as the big things. Every November for Thanksgiving, families gather around a big table loaded with food, and many will bow for prayer before the meal to express their thankfulness to God. If we only do that occasionally, then we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that maybe we are not modeling genuine thankfulness to our families.

We should express gratitude verbally and by demonstration every single day of our lives, even in the worst of circumstances. With a genuinely grateful heart for the good things in life, your children and mine can learn the positive lesson of a truly thankful heart.

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