Being Grateful for Problems

It’s a well-known and powerful idea to express gratitude for life’s blessings. Everyone has blessings they can be grateful for. For some, it can be as basic as being grateful to walk, see, hear, smell or breathe. We can be thankful for food and shelter, friends, family, a community, liberty, safety, and a purpose in life. The list is endless; we only need to look.

But in a conversation with my mother in Montreal this week, another branch of gratitude came up.

She was telling me that her house alarm had gone off by mistake at 5am, which completely threw her off. She was exhausted all day, had trouble taking a nap, couldn’t even do her Thursday Shabbat cooking. I could feel her fatigue on the phone.

But just as I was starting to boost her morale, she beat me to the punch.

“These are the problems I want,” she told me.

I knew where she was going. She knows the kind of “problems” that have dominated our pandemic year—the fatalities, the isolation, the economic devastation, and so on. Compared to those problems, hers are blessings.

In two seconds, she gave me a lesson that can last a lifetime: We can also be thankful for our problems.

That’s it. In two seconds, she gave me a lesson that can last a lifetime: We can also be thankful for our problems.

For those of us lucky enough to have been spared the worst of the pandemic, our problems and challenges may be serious and real, but in 2021, they are also blessings.

Shabbat shalom.