The Gratitude Game

At the end of every podcast, we like to ask our guests to share what God has been teaching them in this season of life. This week’s guest is Scott Harrison of Charity: Water.

Psalm 7:17

I will give thanks to the Lord because of his righteousness;

I will sing the praises of the name of the Lord Most High.

The practice of gratitude is so important, which is actually not super intuitive for me. I'm an enneagram eight, you know, I'm always looking for a fight and nothing is ever good enough. It's funny, during the book tour, people would say, look at charity water, you've raised like half a billion dollars and you've grown faster than anyone. Did you ever think that you guys would be so successful? 

I'm like, this is such a small fraction of what I believe we should have and would have achieved by now. I'm totally dissatisfied with 11 million people. It's frickin clean water. You know, I've got friends that built and sold video games for twice as much money as I've raised to save human life in half the time, you know, so I think there's just this sense of discontent that is kind of who I am and it's just how I look at things. 

So I've been trying in this season to just really be grateful. I mean, I've got my family, I've got my kids. You know, we wake up every morning and we try to play the gratitude game and list out 30 or 50 things that we're grateful for, our health, our family, you know, the ability just to be a couple hours outside of New York City with our loved ones in their 80s and know that we can probably protect them a little bit better

Even, the other day we were walking through the woods and I was thanking God for the thorns. And my kids are like, why thorns? And I'm like, well, I have a machete in my hand. And it's fun to cut them down as we're like cutting a path through the backyard. 

So I think I'm just trying to just be so grateful in the midst of really bad news, both for our organization and our impact and giving. Obviously, I've got many friends in New York City who are sick with COVID 19 and are really struggling and have double pneumonia. I think everybody listening can attest it has been a very, very long and bad news cycle. 

And I'll tell you, you know, if you sit around with a spouse or your kids or you just go out on your own, the minute you finish naming 50 things you're grateful for, it really just changes you. I mean, you can last on that for a while before you go back into the grumbling or irritability that many of us are experiencing cooped up with our kids, ready to do homeschool.