Giving Thanks in a COVID Moment

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

I went for almost three years avoiding COVID-19. Then, a few months ago, after a band rehearsal where, we later discovered, one of us was unknowingly infected, I began to sneeze and cough. So I took a home test. The first day: all good, no sign of the virus.

But then, the next, there was: a red-lined positive result. I felt disoriented for a moment, felt a bit of disbelief, some disappointment, and a tinge of fear. But I had, amid the jumble of emotions, enough clarity to realize that God can be trusted even in a setback, and that thanks would make a good alternative to an attack of anxiety. I told myself that God and the situation warranted gratefulness. Not thanks for COVID, not thanks for the disease itself, not for the disruption and discomfort and even heartache it can bring, but thanks amid my sighting of the angry telltale line on the medical test strip.

Thanksgiving often makes a natural place to start when we feel an urge to pray. Sometimes when people say they don’t really know how to begin, they mean they need a jump start, a simple nudge to get them launched out of standing still or getting capsized with swirling thoughts and feelings.

And why not start with gratitude for the daily stuff, the ordinary or extraordinary? We come grateful, ready to call to mind and recite the abundance of blessings strewn about among what someone called life’s grubby particulars.

A friend of mine has little interest in church and traditional faith, yet she finds herself drawn to spiritual matters. “Sometimes,” she told me once, “when I see something beautiful—a baby laughing, the sun coming up—I feel moved to give a short prayer of thanks.” A little powerful word like thanks can encapsulate a world of experience or sentiment or a passing moment of gratitude.

Lying in bed not long ago, awakened too early to feel rested and not late enough to get up, I found my mind again tumbling with thoughts and remembered incidents from the day. My sleeplessness was an urgent, jumbled affair. Wordy thoughts pounded down running trails in my mind.

But then I thought of ways I’d been experimenting with simpler, one-word prayers. And now, fully sleepless, I found that I was able to turn some of the agitation into prayer with the single word “Thanks!” The word helped me feel gratitude to God for some good things that had happened in the day behind me. I noticed how a single word can snag a racing thought and tie it onto our efforts to pray and adore God. My prayers became less restive.

I often find thanksgiving voiced to God lifts me to a larger view. To start with thanks means we begin our conversation on a foundation of what we have, not what we lack, what we already enjoy at God’s hand, not what we might crave. We call to mind the God we are addressing, who is worthy of every tremor of thankfulness.

I don’t mean to be glib here. Some moments mean all we can muster in prayer is a groan or mumbled placeholder. Some things are deeply distressing. These lamentable things belong in our prayers, too, even in our prayers of protest against what the world has become.

But thanks takes a longer view. And maybe some of the things we ask for later will then press upon us with lightened urgency or less agitation. Perhaps we won’t ask at all, having found a new contentment, or we will ask with more ease and a notch less of anxiety.

And thanks, the mere uttering of the word, often leads us out of ourselves or turns us upward, from merely thanking God for something, to being aware of God as Someone. As a Good Presence, a companion who invites us to find enjoyment and delight in the presence. We may discover the difference between praise (gratitude for who God is) and thanksgiving (gratefulness for what God gives).

And then, we go on, thanking God for the next thing, even the challenging thing. And the next.