Appreciation...gratitude...thankfulness

I spent six hours yesterday, running around in gorgeous weather (we were in Sacramento, not San Francisco, hence the nice weather) playing ultimate, the sport I love. We had a fun time and I played fairly well, so surely ultimate was the highlight of my day, right? Nope. It was a cool little story that happened shortly after I got to the fields.

After I checked in at the registration table, I was checking out brackets and schedules for the day when a woman came up and said, "You're Chris Winkler, aren't you?" I was kind of taken aback, but I affirmed that she was correct. "You sent us a thank you note last year...you're the best ever." Though that's probably not verbatim, it conveys the gist of our conversation and what I'm getting at. Let me explain...

I was at this same tournament, Hat in the Sac, last year as well. It was a first-year event, but was very well organized and a lot of fun, so when I got back to SF, I sent the organizers a thank you note for putting on such a great tourney. It wasn't much, just an e-mail expressing my congratulations for a successful tournament and appreciation for making it happen (tournaments are not easy things to pull off).

This woman, Megan, was one of the organizers and the effect of that thank you note was obvious! She sought me out of the other hundred participants and thanked me for my thank you note! There is a bit of irony in this, but it brought out something that is absent in our society, and that is gratitude. As a missionary, it has been drilled into me from books, my supervisors, and experience that thank you notes are important in support raising. But what about in thanking our parents for things they did for us growing up? What about our coaches for volunteering time to hang out with us as teenagers? What about our friends for simply being there? One of the things that we hear over and over from the groups that serve with us--most of whom come from affluent backgrounds--is that they will no longer take for granted what they have. They tend to thank God for his provision in their lives, and often then choose to live more simply.

And I'm not just talking about expression of gratitude, but simply feeling it. If you start to feel gratitude toward those around you--and those who came before us, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.--then our lives will change. And when that feeling comes, expressions of it will come. It might be in the form of an e-mail, a phone call, or (imagine this) a snail-mail letter, but it will mean a lot no matter its form. It's a lesson I'm still learning, and will probably never fully learn in this lifetime.