Thinks For Thanking Of Me

Both the word think and the word thank come from the same Old English root word, which isn’t entirely surprising since they’re only one vowel sound different from each other. Rene Descartes famously stated I Think, therefore I am. He could have continued by saying I Am, therefore I thank. When Lehi was instructing his son Jacob, he said that “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2:25). We exist so that we might have joy, that we might rejoice, that we might thank. King Benjamin taught, “I say unto you, my brethren, that if you should render all the thanks and praise which your whole soul has power to possess, to that God who has created you, and has kept and preserved you, and has caused that ye should rejoice, and has granted that ye should live in peace one with another - I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another - I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.” (Mosiah 2:20-21). That phrase “unprofitable servants” has always nagged at me a little. I have often felt ashamed and dismayed at the many, many times when I’ve been at my worst and so obviously unprofitable, but Benjamin is saying that even at my best, I would not be a profitable servant. And that’s OK. It’s more than OK. Me being an unprofitable servant is exactly according to plan. The Lord does not expect nor require  me or anyone else to be a profitable servant. When Jesus dined at the house of Simon the Pharisee, He told the story of a creditor with two debtors - one owed five hundred pence and the other fifty. Jesus asked Simon which of the two debtors, after being forgiven, loved their forgiver the most. Our whole reason for being is to know God. God is love. The more we know God, the more we love God. The more God forgives us, the more we will love Him. It is God’s most unprofitable servants, the ones He has to forgive the most, that will love Him the most, that will know Him the most. To return to Descartes for a moment, we think therefore we exist. At our most basic level, we are intelligences who can think for ourselves. Over the last half millennium, through the Age of Enlightenment and the application of the Scientific Method, we have sharpened and refined our ability to think and it has all led to one irrefutable fact. We are nothing. We are insignificant. The world went from the Earth with a few pretty lights fluttering about it, to one tiny speck in a vast Solar System, to one tiny glint in a mighty galaxy, to one insignificant corner of an infinitely large universe, to just four percent of something so big and unknowable that we can’t see or detect hardly any of it. The more we think, the smaller and more unprofitable we get. But that’s only half of the story. Thinking allows us to separate ourselves from the universe, carve out a space for ourselves, draw a line between the thinking thing and everything else. To have any kind of identity, to have a sense of self, to have an independent spirit, to have agency to choose for ourselves, this is a necessary process. We have to pry ourselves away from the universe, from God even, in order to think for ourselves. This allows us to see ourselves and to glimpse God, and to get even the tiniest notion of what a staggering, soul-crushing, unimaginably huge difference there is between our own nothingness and God’s Everythingness. But God does not want us to come to this stark realization and then collapse in on ourselves like some nihilistic blackhole. Thinking is the first step of the plan but it’s not the last. We think, therefore we are, but we are, therefore we must thank, must rejoice, must have joy. If thinking for ourselves separates us from God - a necessary step - then thanking brings us back into God’s embrace, not to be mindlessly resorbed as some unthinking, inanimate appendage, but as an unprofitable servant, weak and imperfect but grateful and fiercely loving for we have been forgiven much, even all. To return to King Benjamin, “And again I say unto you as I have said before, that as ye have come to the knowledge of the glory of God, or if ye have known of his goodness and have tasted of his love, and have received a remission of your sins, which causeth such exceedingly great joy in your souls, even so I would that ye should remember, and always retain in remembrance, the greatness of God, and your own nothingness, and his goodness and long-suffering towards you, unworthy creatures, and humble yourselves even in the depths of humility, calling on the name of the Lord daily, and standing steadfastly in the faith of that which is to come, which has spoken by the mouth of the angel. And behold, I say unto you that if ye do this ye shall always rejoice, and be filled with the love of God, and always retain a remission of your sins; and ye shall grow in the knowledge of the glory of him that created you, or in the knowledge of that which is just and true.” (Mosiah 4:11-12). To thank is not to stop thinking. Having gratitude in the midst of great tragedy and sorrow is not to ignore or repress or devalue the legitimacy of our pain and suffering. Adam and Eve fell that men and women might be. Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and in so doing passed on to each of their descendants the capacity to hold within themselves the knowledge of both good and evil, pleasure and pain, sweetness and bitterness, thinking and thanking. It is our capacity to retain in remembrance both the greatness of God and our own nothingness that makes a fulness of joy possible. True joy comes when we can look on our own unprofitable and imperfect state with unflinching clarity, unclouded by any ego-saving justifications, and yet, at the same time, have the unconquerable humility to accept God’s Grace and His goodness with a love so fierce as to burn away all of our delusions and our false modesties. Just because we can think of all of the true and accurate reasons that we are unworthy of God’s love does not mean we have the imperative to refuse His goodness and mercy. And just because we choose to have a grateful heart does not mean that we have stopped thinking of the cold hard realities of the personal hell we are slogging through. Thinking and thanking are on an etymological level inextricably linked together; however, even more importantly, on an ontological level, thinking and thanking are two halves of our immortal souls, two of the most fundamental and irrefutable attributes of each of God’s children. Thinking may explain why we have the ability to choose for ourselves, but thanking explains why we choose to embrace God, to rejoice in our tribulations, to glory in our persecutions, to continually run through hell and into the fountain of all righteousness, to serve Him however unprofitably and to love Him who forgave much, even all.