Overcoming Gripe
By: John Thomas
Tags: Christianity, Religion, Spirituality, Faith, Gratitude

A blueprint for building and maintaining a heart of gratitude.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The great American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou has seemingly countless quotes and lines that are memorable and challenging. One such quote, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain,” highlights an aspect of our culture that is less than ideal: we complain. A lot. According to an article on VentureBeat we complain 879 million times a year on social media alone. We complain about our jobs. We complain about the weather. And of course we complain about politics.

It’s not as if all this complaining is good for us. Dr. Travis Bradberry in an article on Medium publication The Mission, explains some of the negative effects complaining has on our brain. Dr. Bradberry writes, “Research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus — an area of the brain that’s critical to problem solving and intelligent thought.” Complaining doesn’t only lead to “brain damage” either, it can also make people, “more susceptible to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.”

If ruining our health wasn’t enough, complaining can also ruin our relationships. This article in the Chicago tribune by freelance writer Danielle Braff, cites the same Stanford study as Dr. Bradberry and follows the negative effects complaining has on relationships between married couples and even between parents and children.

As a former middle school teacher I am no stranger to all of this gripe. Rarely did a day go by in which a student didn’t complain about a classmate, the temperature of the classroom, a reading, or an assignment. I tried various ways to keep things interesting and engaging, but middle schoolers are a fickle bunch. The griping persisted.

And as mentioned before, it isn’t only middle school students who gripe and grumble and groan. We don’t move on from middle school to high school to university to life and leave our griping behind. Our sinful and gripe-filled hearts come with us as we proceed from one stage of life to the next.

But aren’t we as followers of Jesus called to a life free from griping? And if so, how can we succeed in this battle against gripe and for gratitude?

A Call to Gratitude

The Bible, both in the Old and New Testament, is crystal clear on its mandate for our hearts to maintain a posture of gratitude and not one of griping and grumbling.

Psalm 50:14, “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the most high…”

The context of Psalm 50 is a courtroom scene where God is calling the Israelites to account for their improper worship. Verse 14 is God’s prescribed remedy: thanksgiving, aka gratitude.

In the New Testament we can look to 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

How can we succeed in this battle against gripe and for gratitude?

It is literally God’s will for us to give thanks when we lose our jobs, or are stuck in a dead end one. Give thanks when we lose something or don’t find what we were looking for. When relationships break down or when opportunities pass us by we are still to give thanks.

These aren’t two cherry picked verses used out of context to prove a point. They are the foundation, the backbone of a theology of gratitude that permeates God’s word from Genesis to Revelation. The degree to which we take this call to gratitude seriously is the degree to which we will see fruit in our battle against gripe.

Purpose and Perspective

One of the main reasons my middle school students would gripe is because they felt that the assignment on a particular day had no purpose. They would view it as a mundane and menial task only good for being griped about. When we feel our work, our lives, have no purpose we can be tempted to fall into the same trap.

The degree to which we take this call to gratitude seriously is the degree to which we will see fruit in our battle against gripe.

One year, on the first day of school, I told my students a story I had found online with the intention of giving them a proper perspective about the work we were going to be doing that year. It goes like this:

A man is walking down a road and he see a construction site. He wonders what is being built there so he asks the first worker is sees. ‘Excuse me, what are you doing here?’ he asked”

“Can’t you see, I’m pushing a wheelbarrow,” grunted the worker.

Not satisfied with this answer he asked a second worker, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m building a wall,” answered the second worker.

Still dissatisfied he asked a third worker, “What are you doing here?”

“We are building a castle and it is going to be magnificent,” said the third worker.

When we view our day, our tasks, our filling out the same old report, our doing the dishes for the millionth time, as meaningless, as just pushing a wheelbarrow, we miss the bigger picture of what God is doing to us and through us in that work and we invite the temptation to gripe into our lives. On the other hand, if we view our work today, our seemingly mundane tasks as an important and necessary step in the process of building a magnificent castle, God will bless our work and in the place of gripe our hearts will be filled with gratitude.

Go Therefore and Gripe no more

If we keep in mind just how central to our faith the call to gratitude is, and if we view our work, even our mundane tasks, as important steps in building God’s kingdom we will have many victories in the battle against griping. And when our cubicle buddies are complaining about having to stay at work late again, but our hearts respond in gratitude, we will unleash on them a powerful testimony of the heart-transforming power of the gospel. SDG

John Thomas is a freelance writer. His writing has appeared at Christ and Pop Culture, Desiring God, and Christianity Today. He writes regularly at Soli Deo Gloria.