My youngest son lines up the dominoes just so. He is working on our oval-shaped coffee table and he has spent many quiet minutes setting up each domino to create a swirling loop. My job is to hit the record button on my phone, ready to catch the toppling action and play it back in slow motion.
After many frustrating false starts, he is gleeful when it finally works, when each tile is perfectly spaced to hit the next, creating a chain reaction of happiness.
November is the month when we focus on gratitude, when we prepare for a holiday that centers around giving thanks. I think of all the activities we do with kids to help them name what they are thankful for: each feather on a turkey, or leaf on a tree named with specific blessings. Adults, too, turn our attention to the good gifts in our lives: We start gratitude journals, join gratitude challenges online, and spend at least some time intentionally thanking God in prayer.
But it is often difficult for us to feel grateful when we are in the midst of a hard and painful season, when we look around and see way more reasons to be anxious and fearful than thankful. We know all the dominoes are supposed to lead to gratitude, but the first tile falls flat.
Meredith Miller, in her book Woven, makes the case that our God is a God of joy, and that grace, joy, and gratitude are linked together:
“Practicing gratitude will cause us to understand grace and live with more joy. Starting with joy will spark gratitude and deepen grace.”*
I would add that all three are connected to generosity, for it is out of the abundant grace in our lives and the resulting gratitude that we can give to others, perpetuating their joy and ours. All four are a circle of dominoes and when you tip one, you topple them all.
In the 1922 novel Enchanted April, two women who are dissatisfied with their lives leave their husbands behind for a month-long vacation on the Italian Riviera. The castle they rent, and the surrounding scenery, is so beautiful that one of the characters—Lotty Wilkins—bubbles over with joy. She becomes immensely grateful to be away from her dreary home in England and in the midst of so much beauty. She considers it all grace.
As a response, she cannot help but write to her husband immediately and invite him to join her, much to the confusion of her traveling companion. In trying to explain her actions, she says:
“’It’s the least I could do. Besides—look at this.’ Lotty waved her hand. ‘Disgusting not to share it.’”**
Lotty’s joy helps her to see grace, which turns to gratitude, then turns to generosity. The best domino effect.
Perhaps in our own lives, it feels a stretch to try to conjure up gratitude when we are far from thankful. But maybe our efforts are misplaced. Maybe we ought to be pursuing joy, beauty, and delight, and letting gratitude bubble over as a result.
Our God is a God of joy after all—from creating sunsets and flowers for our good pleasure to turning water into wine, to pointing to our future everlasting joy in God’s presence, it is evident we were made in the image of a joyful God.
“Our response to a world falling apart is to act in the image of the God who made us. We are called to remake what evil has unmade, to reconcile God’s world back to God, even as Christ has reconciled us. It sounds like a large task, but Christ has already accomplished it. Our job is only to join the dance, to declare with our souls and lives that death is not the truest thing at the heart of the universe, but life, beauty, joy.”***
If gratitude feels forced this year, let’s instead cultivate joy in our daily rhythms. Let’s turn our attention to the things that make our hearts smile and let’s recognize those things as God’s grace in our lives. By doing so, thankfulness will naturally follow, and out of our gratitude we will be compelled to share with others, creating another domino effect of joy in someone else’s life.
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*From Woven, by Meredith Miller, p. 164
**From Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim, p. 194
***From Aggressively Happy by Joy Marie Clarkson, p. 277.
****Feature photo from Canva
Sarah K. Butterfield 