Episode 12: Gratitude in Advance

Did you know you can be grateful for things that haven't happened yet?  You can't know exactly what the future holds, but if you visualize what you hope for and believe is possible, you can experience a feeling of gratitude now, that will fuel you toward a future that is full of things to be grateful for. Tune into this week's episode to consider a whole new way of looking at what it means to have faith. 

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 12, Gratitude in Advance.

I'm Emily Ricks and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hi there. Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm thankful for you that you're listening to this podcast. I'm thankful for the technology that makes it possible for me to speak into a microphone in my own house, upload that file to a host that publishes it to a platform that you can then access from your phone or maybe your computer anytime you want to. What a world we live in.

Isn't it incredible? Today, I want to share a concept that I think is so cool. It's the idea of being grateful in advance for things that haven't happened yet. Have you ever felt gratitude for something that hadn't happened yet? Did you know that's possible to do? I'm going to share an experience I had with this recently.

The other day I woke up at 2.30 a.m. for no particular reason. I tried to go back to sleep and realized it was going to be one of those nights where I was awake and I noticed a feeling of worry and uneasiness about my kids. There were lots of thoughts buzzing around in my head.

What if I'm not doing enough to teach them how to seek God's voice in their lives? What if I'm not doing enough to teach them healthy habits for life in terms of taking care of their bodies and using technology wisely and managing their time and their responsibilities? What if they use their agency to make choices that have really big, awful consequences? I love Philippians chapter 4 verse 6 and I have a sign in my bathroom that says, worry about nothing, pray about everything. This is something I'm working on in my life right now. So I've done this a few times where I wake up in the night and notice that I'm worrying about something and I say, ah, this is an opportunity to pray.

So in this case, I went into the hallway outside my kids' rooms, I knelt down and I prayed for each of them. And sometimes when I pray, I really want to just ask God to make my kids' lives easy and shield them from any problems and prevent them from making any mistakes. And I want to ask him to tie everything up with a nice bow so we can all be happy and healthy all the time.

And I'm thankful for the wisdom of the apostle Paul who said, we know not what to pray for as we ought, but the spirit itself make it the intercession for us with groanings, which cannot be uttered. I know that's true for me. Sometimes I don't actually know what to pray for.

And that night I decided to ask, what do I pray for here? I'm worried about the problems that my children face and the decisions that they'll make and the flood of media and technology in this world. It seems like it might drown them. And I had the impression to just come back to gratitude.

Instead of asking God to bulldoze all the challenges and obstacles out of their path, I had the impression to just express gratitude for what is. Gratitude for their lives and for who they are. Gratitude for the way they've grown and learned.

And that over the years I've gotten to teach them how to walk and talk and share and read and sing and play the piano and pray and forgive. So that's what I started expressing in a prayer. I'm thankful for who they have become and who they are today.

And then something interesting happened. I started expressing gratitude for who they would become. I started thanking God for the miracles he would work in their lives in the future.

And as I did this, I no longer felt worried. My heart was infused with a feeling of deep gratitude. And not just gratitude for my kids as they currently are, but gratitude for who they will be in the future.

But how can I be grateful for that? I don't know what their future looks like. I don't know what decisions they will make or how things will turn out. But that's what I believe.

You actually can be grateful for something you don't have yet. You can be grateful for something that hasn't happened yet. You can be grateful for a miracle that has not yet occurred.

Do you think this sounds ridiculous? You might say, you can't be grateful for something that might not even happen. That's absurd. And that's fine.

You don't have to believe it. But think about this. It's actually the same exact concept as worry.

It's just a little bit of a different flavor. Have you ever worried about something? Have you ever worried that you'll mess up during a performance or that someone will be mad at you or that someone will do something unkind to someone you love? How can you be afraid right now about something that hasn't actually happened yet? It's the same thing, right? Your brain doesn't really know the difference between past, present, and future. What I mean by that is that if you dwell on, focus on, and think about something you really don't want to happen in the future, you will feel fear and anxiety about it right now.

If you dwell on, focus on, and think about something in the past, and you think thoughts about how awful it was, you will feel emotions about it in this present moment. Right? Do you see what I'm saying? If you're excited about a trip that you're going to take in a few weeks, you're excited about something that hasn't happened yet. You might have airline tickets, you might have a hotel booked.

So you're pretty sure that it will actually happen, but it actually might not. And yet you still choose to be excited about it before it happens. Gratitude is the same way.

You can be grateful right now for something you don't have yet. You can be grateful right now for something that hasn't happened yet. You can be grateful for miracles that have not yet occurred in your life.

And there's a word for this. Do you know what it is? It's called faith. That's what I think anyway.

I think faith is ahead of time. It's gratitude in advance, looking forward to what we hope and believe and feeling peace right now. Gratitude in advance doesn't mean knowing exactly what the future holds.

In the scriptures, we learned that faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things. Therefore, if you have faith, you hope for things which are not seen, which are true. As I was praying for my kids the other night, I didn't get to look in a crystal ball that showed me the future.

I didn't get to flip to the end of the book and read a happy ending that guaranteed my kids get through their teenage years unscathed. But I did experience a peace that passes understanding. I felt an assurance that God will use anything that happens in their lives, anything that they choose, anything that they go through for their good.

And I don't get to know the details yet of what that will look like, but it's still something I can choose to believe. And I've seen it to be true in my own life. I do have some evidence to support this belief.

And also, I don't actually know. I can't actually prove that God will do amazing things for my kids and through my kids in the future. I just choose to believe that he will.

And when I choose that belief, a feeling of worry is replaced with a feeling of gratitude. Gratitude in advance. Gratitude for what I can anticipate will happen.

What I hope will be. Gratitude as I hope for things that I can't see, but that I believe are true. This is faith.

The apostle Paul says that hope is an anchor to the soul. I've heard that many times and I love it. And I usually picture like a boat being tossed on the waves of the ocean.

And there's this anchor that grounds it and keeps it from moving. And I love that metaphor. There's another one I heard recently from Rudy Rickstance.

He's a mindset coach. And he had a different way of thinking about an anchor than anything I'd ever heard before. He says that you cast an anchor out in front of you to what you want by thinking about it and visualizing it.

And then that anchor actually pulls your body and your life experience toward it. So he says, our thoughts are the anchors we cast out. And then our body gets pulled toward what we're thinking about.

And the mind will filter out anything that isn't relevant to the anchor that we cast out in front of us. So we won't be able to see that and we won't be looking for it. We see what we have cast out as the anchor and we walk toward it.

So my invitation to you is that you can throw out in front of you an anchor toward the idea that God will work miracles in your life, in your children's lives. And worry is visualizing what will happen in the future that will be awful. Faith is visualizing what will happen in the future.

That will be amazing. Hope is an anchor to the soul and anchor that we cast out in front of us by choosing to be grateful in advance for the future that we can't see, but that we trust is going to be beautiful. I don't know if the words I'm using to describe this are conveying the image I have in my mind, but I want you to know that you can choose to be grateful right now for the miraculous way.

God is going to consecrate your afflictions for your gain. And I know you don't know how he will do that yet. You can't see the details of how it will happen because it hasn't happened yet, but you can choose to be grateful that you know he will somehow in his way and in his time.

This is faith. This is hope choosing to believe that the future will be filled with things to be grateful for. And this belief, this hope, this anchor to your soul will make your worries fade away.

They will no longer feel relevant because they don't relate to the anchor you've cast in front of you that you are now moving toward. You can choose to worry about the future and try to imagine all the ways things will be terrible and full of hard and scary things. You can also choose to be grateful for the future and try to imagine all the ways it will be miraculous and full of God's power to mend and heal and redeem.

In the end, it comes down to what you choose to focus on, whether you discipline your mind to dwell on what is virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, or if you allow it to fixate on what is awful, ugly, unsettling, or dreadful. Which do you choose? I wish for you a feeling of deep gratitude as you choose to think about, dwell on, focus on, and hope for a beautiful future. Not a future where you know exactly how everything will go.

Not a future without pain or struggle, but a future where all things will work together for your good. This is gratitude in advance. This is faith.

And you can use your agency to choose it within your own mind anytime you would like to. Try out gratitude in advance, my friend. It's available to you right now.

My hope is that it will bless your life. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.