What Was Playing on the Way to a Meeting I Did Not Want

Friday morning I had a forty five minute drive to a meeting I already knew was going to be hard.

I am not going to tell you what the meeting was. It does not matter for this. What matters is what was on the radio.

The song

Christian station out of East Texas. A song came on about having so much to be thankful for. A roof, a bed, groceries, clean water, shoes. A list of ordinary things sung like they were miracles.

I turned it up. I was not in the mood for it and I turned it up anyway, which is a thing I have learned to do.

Then the next one. A song about Christ as a firm foundation, and the ground shaking, and the ground holding.

I drove the whole rest of the way with those two in my head, and I walked into a meeting that went about like I expected it to go, and then I drove forty five minutes home.

What I used to think gratitude was

I used to think gratitude was the feeling you had after things went well.

You get the good news, you feel thankful. You get the bad news, you feel something else. Gratitude was a reaction. A receipt for a good outcome.

That version of gratitude is worthless on the drive to a hard meeting, because you do not have the outcome yet. You just have the drive.

What I think it is now

A practice you do before you know how the day goes.

You list the roof and the bed and the shoes on the way in, not because the meeting is going to go well, but because the roof and the bed and the shoes are true no matter how the meeting goes. They were true on the drive there. They were true on the drive back. The meeting did not touch them.

That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick. It is aim. You are deciding, before the outcome, what you are going to carry home.

The honest part

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where people get preachy and I do not want to.

Gratitude did not fix the meeting. It did not change one word that was said in that room. I was still angry driving home. I still lost most of the day. The practice does not make bad things good.

What it did was decide the size of the bad thing. The meeting was one hour in a day that also had a roof over my family, a truck that started, and a road home. When I let the meeting be the whole day, it was the whole day. When I put it next to the list, it was one line on a long page.

That is not nothing. On some days that is the difference between a bad afternoon and a bad week.

Firm foundation

The second song is the one I keep coming back to.

I have had years where the ground moved. Where every single thing I thought was solid turned out to be sand. Business, name, family, freedom. I know what it is to watch a foundation fail.

And I know what did not fail. Not because I was strong. I was not. Because it was never resting on me.

So when I drive to a hard meeting now and the radio hands me that song, I do not hear a nice sentiment. I hear a report from somebody who has already been through the shaking and is telling me, from the other side of it, what held.

What I would tell you

If you have a hard thing coming this week, do the list on the way in. Out loud if you are alone in the truck. The roof. The people. The road.

Not because the hard thing is going to go well.

Because those things are going to be true either way, and you get to decide which of them you carry home.