Today’s article is another installment in Brother P.’s column, “Lessons From the Nursing Home.”

My job is to work with people in a nursing home, and in doing so I get to meet many different people of many different cultures, nationalities, and ages, and even with many different illnesses or injuries that brought them into the nursing home.

You know the type of people I like to work with the least? I don’t like working with ungrateful people.

(Since this is the Gospel Blog and all, I’m going to say the rest in a different manner.)

I really appreciate working with people who are grateful.

When you have a person who has just had a recent surgery, and the surgeon forgot to send them with their pain medication order, and they left the hospital just before lunch and got to our facility just after midnight because the transport van had a three-hour drive but also hit gridlock traffic, got a flat tire, and was pulled over for speeding, making the total time strapped to a gurney, looking at the ceiling of a van, and feeling hungry and in pain an eternity.

I am awestruck when I greet this person, and instead of complaining, demanding, angering (if that is a word), and fussing about all the wrongs that they endured, he instead says something like, “Well, I am glad to be here now,” or “That van driver did all he could,” or “We all make mistakes.”

I wonder if the reason those people are so grateful is that they know Christ? When enduring the trials of life, they compare their situation with that of the Lord and realize that we have never been so inconvenienced, never been so wronged, and never been so mistreated as humanity mistreated our own Creator — and He allowed it for our salvation! I wonder if that is where a true grateful heart comes from.

This article has undergone ministry review and approval.