Grateful for Unfortunate Circumstances

I haven't blogged about a General Conference talk for a long time, and I still have two or three sessions to cover before the next one happens. The next Conference talk on the list is President Deiter F. Uchtdorf's Sunday Morning Session talk, Grateful if Any Circumstances.

He spoke about how we often speak of being grateful for things, specifically blessings, but he recommended being grateful in any circumstance, whether we feel that we're being blessed or not. He said:

Perhaps focusing on what we are grateful for is the wrong approach. It is difficult to develop a spirit of gratitude if our thankfulness is only proportional to the number of blessings we can count. True, it is important to frequently “count our blessings”—and anyone who has tried this knows there are many—but I don’t believe the Lord expects us to be less thankful in times of trial than in times of abundance and ease.

It's difficult to be grateful in times of trial, but one way to do it is to remember that God often blesses His children through their trials. Hardships can help us develop strength and wisdom, which help make us more like God. Sometimes, certain blessings can only come by way of trials, or are made sweeter by our having experienced trials before receiving the blessings.

Last week, using the restroom was often inconvenient and/or unpleasant. I often had to walk a good distance, usually uphill, to find a working latrine, and when I found one, I often found that there was a very unpleasant smell to the latrine that made using the restroom an overall unpleasant experience. However, those unpleasant experiences helped me to develop sensorial fortitude (that is, it helped me develop the skill of ignoring my nose), and honestly, I should have been grateful to have access to latrines at all. Plus, for the first few days since I came home, I found myself very grateful to have convenient access to flushing toilets, sinks with soap and warm water, showers with adjustable temperatures, and other blessings, such as sidewalks and streets that don't coat your shoes and socks with dust, telecommunication, and my comfortable bed. Being temporarily deprived of blessings I tend to take for granted helped me to be grateful for blessings I've had all along.

However, President Uchtdorf also said:

We sometimes think that being grateful is what we do after our problems are solved, but how terribly shortsighted that is. How much of life do we miss by waiting to see the rainbow before thanking God that there is rain? 

Being grateful in times of distress does not mean that we are pleased with our circumstances. It does mean that through the eyes of faith we look beyond our present-day challenges.

While I was not necessarily pleased with having to use glorified outhouses for a week, I was certainly grateful for the opportunity to go to Scout Camp. Though some of the conditions were less than perfect, and there certainly were a few things I could have complained about, overall, I was just grateful to be there. It was an experience, but it was a good one. Actually, I find that most experiences are good ones if you know how to make challenges fun or funny, or if you learn and/or grow as a result of the experience. I may be misinterpreting the meaning of President Uchtdorf's talk, but I think that there are several tricks to turn bad experiences into good ones, and as long as you use one or two of those tricks whenever bad things happen, all experiences can be good ones.

Most often, you just need a little bit of perspective and patience to see how your trials work out to be blessings, and once you have that, it becomes possible to be grateful, even for your trials.