Finally, I want to say a bit more, as promised, about the vital importance of maintaining throughout the day an attitude of real gratitude to God for his many blessings. We’ve already seen that a good number of the classic works on Christian spirituality have emphasized the important relationship between the practice of the presence of God and an ongoing engagement in worship, praise, and thanksgiving. What I want to underscore here is my understanding of how the connection between giving thanks to God and the experience of his presence is not only correlative, but causative as well. We all know how easy it is to worship and give thanks during those wonderful moments when Christ’s presence is palpably evident to us (see Ephesians 5:18–20). This is what I mean when I say that the presence of God and giving thanks just seem to go together, to correlate.

            But what about those times when the divine presence is not so patently obvious to us—those seasons of spiritual dryness referred to by spiritual life authors such as Thomas à Kempis and Richard Foster? While I heartily endorse what à Kempis, Foster, and others have said about the value of simply and patiently waiting these seasons out, I want to go on to state that my experience has been that during times when a sense of Christ’s nearness has been noticeably absent in my life, the spiritual discipline of giving thanks to God in an intentional, proactive, yet sincere manner has often brought about a fresh season of his existential proximity. In other words, I want to suggest that the act of giving thanks in the face of one’s ambiguous, perhaps even adverse, circumstances can actually cause or facilitate a renewed sense of Christ’s empowering presence.

           In Psalm 50:23 we read, “He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.” I’m more than intrigued with the idea that giving thanks in a deliberate, proactive manner can somehow precipitate God’s providential involvement in my life—I’m convinced of it! While I don’t mean for this to be understood as a foolproof formula, it’s because of passages such as Psalm 50:23, and the fact that I’ve personally experienced both the correlative and causative connections between giving thanks and the experience of God’s presence, that one of the grand goals of my life is to become a truly praiseful person—a man whose lifestyle is earmarked by the habit of seeing God in everything that happens, and giving him thanks, sometimes by raw faith, as a result (see also Ephesians 5:19–20; Philippians 4:4–7; 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18). Deep down inside, don’t you want to become a perpetually praiseful person too?