Do you get angry over ingratitude?

An angry man is always full of poison. Do not waste some of your few remaining years in bitterness and resentment over past issues. Do not make the human and distressing mistake of expecting gratitude. Christ helped ten lepers in one afternoon, but only one stopped to thank him.

 

^{Luke 17: 11-19}

¹¹ Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. ¹² As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance ¹³ and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

¹⁴ When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.

¹⁵ One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. ¹⁶ He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

¹⁷ Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? ¹⁸ Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹ Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

That’s how it goes. Human nature has always been human nature and it probably won’t change in your lifetime. So why not accept it? Why not be as realistic about it as was old Marcus Aurelius, one of the wisest men who ever ruled the Roman Empire. He wrote in his diary one day: “I am going to meet people today who talk too much- people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won’t be surprised or disturbed, for I couldn’t imagine a world with such people.”

That made sense, doesn’t it? If you and I go around grumbling about ingratitude; Who is to blame? Is it human nature- or is it our ignorance of human nature? Let’s not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don’t get it, we won’t be disturbed.

There is a woman who is always complaining because she is lonely. Not one of her relatives wants to go near her- and no wonder. If you visit her, she will tell you for hours what she did for her nieces when they were children: she nursed them through the measles and the mumps and the whooping cough; she boarded them for years; she helped to send one of them through business school, and she made a home for the other until she got married.

Do the nieces come to see her? Oh, yes, now and then, out of a spirit of duty. But they dread these visits. They know they will have to sit and listen to hours of half-veiled reproaches. They will be treated to an endless litany of bitter complaints and self pitying sighs. And when this woman can no longer bludgeon, browbeat, or bully her nieces into coming to see her, she has one of her “spells.” She develops a heart attack. Is the heart attack real? Oh, yes. The doctors say she has “a nervous heart,” suffers from palpitations. But the doctors also say they can do nothing for her- her trouble is emotional.

What this woman really wants is love and attention. But she calls it “gratitude.”  And she will never get gratitude or love, because she demands it. She thinks it’s her due.

There are thousands of people like her, people who are ill from “ingratitude,” loneliness and neglect. They long to be loved, but the only way in this world that they can ever hope to be loved is to stop asking for it and to start pouring out love without hope of return.

“If we want to find happiness, let’s stop thinking about gratitude or ingratitude and give for the inner joy of giving.”

Parents have been tearing their hair about the ingratitude of children for ten thousand years. Even Shakespeare’s King Lear cried out, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

But why should children be thankful- unless we train them to be? Ingratitude is natural- like weeds. Gratitude is like a rose. It has to be fed and watered and cultivated and loved and protected. If our children are ungrateful, who is to blame? Maybe we are. If we have never taught them to express gratitude to others, how can we expect them to be grateful to us?

If you do not teach your children how to be grateful, they will grow up with the idea that the world owes them a living. And it is a very dangerous idea.

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