Unpopular Takes: On the Other Hand, Thank God Anyway

The other side of last Saturday's post

Last week we considered how people might use Gratitude as a way to spiritually bypass¹ both interacting with God for themselves and acknowledging their difficult circumstances or feelings. I have a feeling a lot of my unpopular takes posts coming up are going to end up challenging spiritual bypassing.

The thing is, many if not most spiritual bypassing techniques, and pat answers, and religious clichés have some rooting in truth and flourishing. Sometimes they come right from the Bible:

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Some day I’ll write here a little bit more about how I “relate to” the Bible (I also talk about it in Follower, which is in for professional editing!), but for now let me acknowledge that it is insistence on verses like the above, with no nuance or acknowledgment of the frequent difficulty of “circumstances,” that often causes people to give up on the Bible, if not also all the things it tells us about.

So…if you don’t want to give up on the Bible but neither do you want to spiritually bypass, what do you do with a verse like that?