June 23, 2009: What It Means To Thank God

Have you ever thought about just exactly what it is we're doing when we thank God?

Bible translators have to think about this when they're putting the Scriptures into languages that have no word for "thank" or "thanksgiving". It's a challenge. Suppose English had no such word - how would you express St. Paul's thought in Romans 1:8: "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you," or his commandment in Philippians 4:6: "In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God"?

If I recall correctly from my Bible translator days, what we do when we thank God (or thank anyone, really) is acknowledge that he is the one responsible for some good thing that made us happy. So, "Thank you for this gift" comes out, "It makes me happy that you gave me this gift," or perhaps, "It is good that you gave me this gift."

The other day I went for a long walk at dawn, and, for a while, before my attention-deficit brain wandered to other stuff, focused on telling God about things he was responsible for that made me happy. Simple things, like the scent of wildflowers or the sight of the reddening sky in the east. I tried to make the effort to express thankfulness
without my usual lazy reliance on the word "thanks," or the phrase, "Thank you."

Someone wrote to me recently asking, "Do you delight in God?" and I wrote back, "Absolutely! Every time I delight in anything I am delighting in God. He made everything, including the ingredients that go into a French Silk pie, and the skillful hands that prepared it, and the taste buds in my mouth that savor it, and the endorphins in my brain that get released even before I have begun to swallow it, and the kind company with which I share it. Where, in any delight, is God not? What delight can we possibly experience that he should not get credit for?"

These days I'm giving God a lot of credit for a lot of delight. Most of that just spills out of my mouth in an inarticulate and repetitive (but heartfelt!) "Oh, God, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. Thank you. I mean, really, thank you! Thanks, God. Thank you. Thank you so very, very much." Because the person who wrote to me asking, "Do you delight in God?" is, herself, the most delightful person I have ever met, and she loves me, and, by God's inscrutable work within her blessed heart, has found it possible to delight in me (seriously!!!), and has agreed to marry me on August 8.

If English had no word for thanks, then I would still tell God how happy I am that he did this, and how he, and he alone, gets all the credit for it.

Rejoice, all of you, rejoice in the Lord, with me and Lisa Krausfeldt.