Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

G.K. Chesterton once said that gratitude was, quote, nearly the greatest of all human duties and nearly the most difficult.

It's the greatest of human duties, because, as Paul wrote to the Church of Corinth, what do we have that

we did not receive? And it's especially difficult after a year like this one, because we see in so

many ways things can get better. Chuck Colson pointed this out in a Thanksgiving commentary on

Breakpoint back in 2011. When life is great, Chuck said, it's easy to be grateful. When life is difficult,

however, expressing gratitude can be a strange yet profound witness to the world. A few years ago,

university psychologist conducted a research project on gratitude and Thanksgiving. They divided

participants into three groups. People in the first group practiced daily exercises like writing in a gratitude journal.

They reported higher levels of alertness, determination, optimism, energy, and less depression and stress than the control group.

Unsurprisingly, they were also a lot happier than the participants who were told to keep an account of all the bad things that happened each day.

One of the psychologists concluded that though a practice of gratitude is a key to most religions, its benefits extend to the general population, regardless of faith or no faith.

He suggested that anybody can increase his sense of well-being just from counting his

blessings. Well, as my colleague Ellen Vaughn wrote in their book, Radical Gratitude, no one is

going to disagree with the fact that gratitude is a virtue. But Allen says, counting our blessings

and conjuring an attitude to whom it may concern gratitude, Polyana style, is not enough. What do we do

when cancer strikes? I've

got two children who have battled it, or when loved ones die, or when we find ourselves in the

midst of brokenness and real suffering. That, she says, is where gratitude gets radical. While they

often mingle together in the life of a follower of Christ, there are actually two types of thankfulness.

One is secondary, the other primary. The secondary sort is thankfulness for blessings received.

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