When my dad told me about it over the phone, I experienced a succession of common reactions: shock, fear, anger, gratitude, fear. The fear was almost paralyzing, despite the fact that Kelsey was unharmed. The thoughts kept running through my mind: Why does God allow car accidents to happen at all? He stopped it this time, but what if he doesn’t tomorrow, and takes my husband and sons away from me?

I cried some of the feelings out, and thanked God more than a few times for protecting her. And as I did, a beautiful thing happened.

The more I thanked Him, the less the fear gripped me. For a few moments I grasped the truth, with my heart as well as my mind, that life is a continuous gift — one I have no control over, one I can’t do anything but thank God for.

Thanksgiving transformed my perspective. It shifted my focus from the negative to the positive, off myself and onto God. That’s why the Bible encourages us to “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) — because thanksgiving assures the soul that there is an Eternal One who will eventually bring us all together in one glorious, unending existence.

THE ANTIDOTE TO LEGALISM

I’ve always struggled with legalism. When you see that God is working in your life, it’s easy to assume this is because you allowed him in, and he is rewarding you for your efforts. Certain elements of Christianity don’t help. So many Bible verses and theological truths, when taken out of context at face value, are easily misunderstood — they sound like my actions can help me earn God’s love.

Yet this same faith teaches that nothing I do can make God love me more. He already loves each of us completely; he did long before we were born.

I’ve been a Christian my whole life, but I only recently heard the story of the prodigal son for the first time. After the prodigal son returns home and is showered with gifts he knows he doesn’t deserve, his older brother complains to their father. “He’s squandered everything you’ve given him, yet you give him more. I’ve been a perfect son, yet you haven’t given me anything!” His words expose my attitude: an implied assumption that I deserve gifts.

The term for this soul ailment is legalism — and thanksgiving is the perfect antidote. The more you thank God, the more you see everything as a gift from him. (A bonus: the more you see everything as a gift from Him, the less you cling to it.) “Do not be deceived, my dear ones,” the book of James says. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of the Heavenly Lights.” In other words, they don’t come from my actions. “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7)

It’s not wrong to want to give God something in return for his love. But our gratitude is what he delights in, not our piety. Sure, gratitude manifests itself in many beautiful actions — in the fruits of the Spirit. But those grow out of a grateful heart. Legalistic actions are like shriveled, musty raisins compared to the sun-grown grapes of organic holiness.

One fruit of my legalism was fear — fear that God would punish or kill me if I didn’t measure up. Thanksgiving cures that, too. When you realize that none of your actions are bringing about the good things in your life, you no longer need to be afraid that your mistakes will cause God to kill you. God isn’t a tit-for-tat old fogey up in the sky. He is “the Comforter and Spirit of Truth, everywhere present and filling all things, the treasury of blessings and giver of life.” I try to calm my soul daily with this reminder. The words are from an ancient prayer, which finishes with “Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.”

O Good One. This is not someone who “refines” me by taking a blow torch to me for my failures. This is someone who cleanses my sins the way a father gives his little one a bath.

THE MARK OF HUMILITY

Another rotten fruit of legalism is pride. I’ve often felt like my struggle with pride is a hopeless battle, because fighting it only seems to make it worse. A passsage from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters perfectly captures my frustrations. A demon tells another demon how to ruin a human. “Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to this fact?

Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride — pride at his own humility — will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt — and so on, through as many stages as you please.”

This pride/humility treadmill befuddled me for years until I finally realized that thanksgiving is the one thing able to knock me off of it. Gratitude is the antithesis of pride, because thanksgiving entails an admission that I had nothing to do with this.

I used to think that humility was just a frame of mind, an absence of pride. Now I see that it’s actually a fullness of thanks. Gratitude is humility in its purest form, because there is no self-awareness involved. You can be proud when you realize that you’re humble, but you can’t be proud when you realize that you’re thankful — because even the ability to be thankful is a gift.

“The virtue of gratitude, like all our other virtues, is first of all necessary for our own selves,” wrote the Russian Orthodox priest Alexander Elchaninov. “The presence within us of a feeling of gratitude proves by itself that we are really imbued with an unflinching faith and love of God. Our gratitude is evidence of a correctly ordered religious soul. ... We all know how to ask; even unbelievers turn to God in an emergency; but we do not know how to thank. A prayer of thanksgiving is the sign of an exalted soul.”

THE GIFT OF GOD

In one Gospel account, Christ heals 10 lepers. Full of delight, the men run to tell everyone what happened. Only one thinks to run back and fall down before Christ in thanksgiving and worship.

I see myself in the men who asked, received and then forgot. But what makes the story so beautiful to me is how good Christ is — He healed the nine other men even though He knew they would not come back to thank Him.

The more we know and are known by God, the more our thanksgiving comes spontaneously. But God is also patient with our lack of thanks. He knows we have many needs, and he loves to meet them. He keeps healing us, like the lepers, despite our ingratitude. Each moment He sustains us with new breath, so that we can grow in His love, learning despite our mistakes.

Now that’s something to be thankful for.