Values Reflect Gratitude

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.



In this first video Mike Rowe shares, he covers two big ideas that are directly connected in his mind. Those two ideas are gratitude and the trade skills gap. At first, when I watched the video, I couldn’t see how those two ideas were connected. But Rowe connected them with a couple of sentences. We’ll go over those ideas.


GRATITUDE

Rowe’s idea is built upon the premise that an “attitude of gratitude” changes your posture enough in life to affect everything you do and experience.

From a Jewish perspective, this point is spot on. This is practiced within the Jewish tradition by the commitment to say multiple blessings throughout the day, thanking God for all the ways He provides and how we encounter Him in our lives. There are blessings for waking each morning, blessings for food (both before and after you eat), blessings for bowel movements (not kidding!), blessings for Sabbath and rest — most orthodox Jews will tell you that a typical day contains anywhere between 70 and 100 blessings (or more). Just try that exercise; it’s hard to get to 40! A great book for further study here would be One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.

Beyond the practice of blessing, the rabbis teach that this impacts your perspective. Or is it that your perspective impacts your gratitude? Either way, it is a beautiful circular experiment. The rabbis have spoken at great length about the “good eye” (also known as ayin tovah in the Hebrew) and the “bad eye” (known as ayin ra’ah). To have a good eye is to live with a sense of optimism and hope; it is to see the good in everything and to assume the best in others. The bad eye is connected to a “scarcity mentality” that always assumes the worst and sees the potential danger, never opening up and sharing, never giving others the benefit of the doubt. Our gratitude impacts our eye, and our eye impacts how grateful we are throughout our experience.

Notice what Jesus says about this idea in Matthew 6:

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

TRADE SKILLS GAP

Now, while I love to float in conceptual clouds and dwell in poetic possibilities, what I loved about Rowe’s work in these videos is how he connected it to very practical application for young adults — the people I work with every day. Rowe’s one statement that just clicked for me was toward the end of the video when he said the following:

“The skills gap isn’t a mystery; it’s a reflection of what we value, and what we value is a reflection of what we’re grateful for.”

This is a great statement of truth to dwell upon for a bit. Obviously, I’m captivated by how appropriate that statement is for so many things, things well outside the topic of skilled labor. The statement is just resounding with some of that conventional wisdom — I want to consider and ponder how far its truth goes.

But the practical application for young adults entering the world of education is also quite staggering. There will be more discussion on this later, but it is helpful for us to consider as families, parents, teachers, mentors, and churches how this truth comes out in the way we mentor our children.

Are we truly grateful for skilled labor?

Do we encourage vocational trades as great options for young leaders?

Do we actually discourage those decisions, telling them “college” is the only option for a bright future?

And while we’re here, has our lack of gratitude impacted the way we see other people groups who usually engage in these trades on our behalf — groups who are often different from many of us ethnically, economically, and culturally? And what’s up with my pronouns? Why do we talk as if there is an “our behalf” — as if the middle-class, white, suburban experience is the one that matters most?

Good food for thought. May we become more grateful for the lives we are given and aware of the ways our eye — tovah or ra’ah — affects our interactions with others and the futures of our children.