Thankful To Whom?

Dear St Andrew’s,

Trivia question: What is the only place in Australia that celebrates Thanksgiving?

Norfolk Island. It has its own official Thanksgiving Day in November, though it falls on a Wednesday rather than the Thursday observed in the United States. I’m not sure why the Americans get a Thursday and Norfolk Islanders a Wednesday, but perhaps they have more important things to do on Thursdays.

We are often encouraged to be grateful: to “count our blessings” or develop “an attitude of gratitude”. Good advice. But it raises a question: thankful to whom?

I recently heard a pastor tell a story about a conversation at Cronulla Life Saving Club. He was standing on the balcony with a retired man, enjoying the beautiful view across Bate Bay. The man was financially comfortable, and his family was doing well. The pastor asked him, “Who are you thankful to for all this?”

“Me!” the man replied. “I’m thankful to me.”

The answer sounds confident, but it is illogical. If the man believed that everything he had was earned and deserved, then he might congratulate himself—but why be thankful? Gratitude is a fitting response to a gift, not to something we think is owed to us. And if he was grateful for what he had received, then “me” could not be the whole answer.

Of course, he may have worked hard and made sacrifices. But did he give himself life, health, ability, or the opportunities that helped his work bear fruit? Did he make his family, or create the sea and sky they were enjoying together? Hard work matters, but none of us is quite as self-made as we might imagine.

One dictionary defines gratitude as the fitting response to a gift, or to something someone has done for us. Gratitude recognises that we have received good things from beyond ourselves. We may earn a pay packet, but much of what makes life good is not something we can claim to have earned.

For Christians, this is especially clear in the good news of Jesus. Paul writes, “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Our deepest reason for thanksgiving does not depend on everything going well. In Christ, God has forgiven us and welcomed us as his children. That gift holds firm even when our circumstances do not.

Jordan Peterson’s Rule 12 in Beyond Order puts it memorably: “Be grateful in spite of your suffering.” Paul’s call to “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) has a similar force, but Christian gratitude is more than a courageous attitude toward hardship. It rests on God’s grace in Christ. We give thanks not because every circumstance is good, but because God’s grace is good and does not let us go.

We’ll have the chance to give thanks together at our church family dinner this Saturday evening. But wherever we are, may we learn to see the good we receive—and to thank the God who gives it.

Thanks be to God!

James