Sometimes the doctor calls with the awful news, your car breaks down on the side of the road for the fifth time in a month, or life just doesn’t go as planned. When that happens, gratitude is never your (my) first response.
One of life’s common complexities is the expectation that you show gratitude when you don’t feel it because life feels unfair.
If appreciation has a scale and thankfulness—showing and expressing gratitude—is on one end, the other end is being unthankful (through apathy and silence). So when you hang up from the call with bad news from a loved one or the mechanic, what do you do?
There’s no formula for expressing gratitude when you’re too numb to respond, so I don’t have an answer here. The best idea I can give: tell your unedited feelings to the One who sees—and years down the road, if time has healed enough to show you any positive outcome from the situation, say thank you then.