Filling the Cup: Grace to Gratitude
My father just turned 90. He and Mum now live together in a nursing home, and my Dad is experiencing the onset of dementia. For those of us who are younger and busier with lives that are full, it can be a test of patience to have a conversation with someone like my father, who keeps repeating things in conversation. I try to remind myself that he is re-living his memories, whether they are 15 minutes old or eighty years old.
But there are some things that I do love to hear my father say. Among them is, “Son, I’m proud of you.” He often says that when we’re saying goodbye on the phone.
Yet there’s one thing I love to hear him say over and over again. In fact he said it today on the phone. He starts by saying, “Whenever I can,” or “Whenever I don’t have anything to do” -which, in a nursing home, is most of the time.
“I think about three things,” He says:
1. I think about the fact that God loves me. Among all of the billions of people in the world, he loves ME -little old me.
2. I think about His forgiveness -that He has forgiven me for all of the sins I have committed. The things I have done wrong, and the things I should have done, but didn’t.
3. I think about the price Jesus had to pay for that.
“That fills me with thankfulness for what he did for me,” he tells me, “and I just sit there thanking God for that.”
I want you to see the significance of what is happening here. This is my father, at the end of his long life, with nothing but time, stripped of the busyness and aspirations that fill a younger person’s life. And what does he do? He fills up the cup of his heart with the goodness of God toward him -the gospel. And it results in an abundance of gratitude. This is what we need, as songwriters.
‘Grateful’ and ‘grace’ are related -both built on the same Latin root: gratus (favour, pleasing). I think this indicates that gratefulness comes from being filled with a sense of grace. My father was filling his thoughts with the grace of God toward him, and that overflowed in gratefulness. What a fulfilling and joyful way to live! David says, “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (Psalm 4:7). We have access to a joy that is infinitely greater than anything we may chase in this world.
My Dad’s discipline ends in gratefulness. It is a cup that’s filled up. What if we can live our life that way?
If you want to write songs of worship -songs of gratefulness to God -then fill your thoughts with the grace and gospel of Jesus Christ. He, for the joy set before Him (our salvation), endured the cross.
I encourage you to fill your thoughts with these three things: God loves me, He has forgiven me, AND He did so at infinite cost to Himself.
Grateful.
Psalm 100:4-5
Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.