David: Well, we are back again after two wonderful weeks away.

Karen: We celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary, which we have determined to do all this year. And so at the great graciousness of friends and family, we took a trip out to California, but we took it by train, by Amtrak.

David: These last two weeks, they were probably the highlight of our celebration for all year, but we’ll talk about it, okay?

Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author, Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David: Karen, we have been on airplanes so many times and we said, “Let’s slow our lives down.

Karen: Well, I’ve been on the airplanes, airplanes so many times. I don’t ever want to get on one again. It’s not fear of airplane riding. It’s just, I’ve done it so much. In fact, I said, I don’t care if I ever pack a suitcase again.

David: That’s probably the bigger thing.

Karen: But the thought of taking a leisurely train ride across America and seeing our son and our, one of our grandsons at the end of that trip when we reached the West Coast was pretty attractive. So we committed ourselves to doing that and through many, many kind gifts from friends and family, we could afford to take an Amtrak and take a special car. It’s called the family bedroom, but there was just the two of us in the family bedroom.

David: Yeah, it was great. We left Chicago, went up through Wisconsin, Minnesota, thinking in my mind in North Dakota. Yeah.

Karen: Crossed the upper edge of the states. It was wonderful.

David: We hit Washington state and down to Portland, Oregon. That was our first stop.

Karen: We have a grandson there. And so we stayed with, he picked us up at the train station. It was so much fun seeing him. And then we stayed with him for a couple of days.

David: And Jen, his wife, who’s a nurse.

Karen: Darling wife, who’s a nurse. Yeah. And then we took the train, again the Amtrak down the coast to, did we get off at San Francisco?

David: Yeah, we got off at San Francisco. So that was a long trip from Portland to San Francisco.

Karen: And our son, Randall Mains, our oldest son and his fiancé met us there and we stayed with him and a wonderful time doing the San Francisco area with them.

David: Yeah, and this was kind of a surprise. We didn’t know that our family had hit up friends, relatives. If you were related to us, look out.  It was so gracious of them. The time in California, I was surprised with the extremes of it. The poverty in the West Coast is so visual.

Karen: For the street people. I mean, it’s just, particularly around that area, partly because the climate in California is better than in the northern states. But it’s just was everywhere, little tents and garbage often all around them. And it was extremely moving. And you saw it on the train as you came into San Francisco, probably in ways you wouldn’t have seen it if you’d been driving because they sort of set up their little tent. It’s not really cities, but it’ll be maybe two or three tents, maybe a single tent. And then you realize that the homeless are living there in those circumstances in that place. It was very evocative. I mean, the train ride out and see what was in it was the Empire Builder Amtrak.

The Empire Builder Amtrak, we took out as you said, we went the Northern route. And I think you can drive it and look out the windows. But when you’re not having to navigate the territory, you’re just a passenger. There’s a different kind of journey that gets taken. We had a sleeper car, which was wonderful. And then you do the traditional go to the dining car and you eat in the dining train and the tablecloth.

The food was excellent. So it was a special way of travel. But I think to me, the outstanding memory both going and coming back was seeing parts of the country that I don’t believe you really see when you’re driving. Sort of the back territory going behind mountains. And, you know, it was just extraordinary.

David: Well, on the way back, we started in California, went through Nevada, Utah.

Karen: We took a lower route, the home.

David: One thing that happens on the train is the day goes slowly, but half of the day is in the dark. So you can’t see out.

Karen: Well, it’s nighttime.  That’s why it’s in the dark.

David: You think this must be beautiful territory. But when the light comes on again and you realize in Colorado, you’re up in the Rockies and there’s snow and oh, that was wonderful.

Karen: You’re riding in the train as the sun comes up and you’re riding in the train as the sun goes down. We were on the train for two and a half days and two nights is what we were on. That was going and coming actually.

David: On the way back we were on what’s called the California Zephyr. That was exciting. I also wanted to say in contrast to the poor and the people in the kind of junk cities, there was also the incredible beauty in California. We spent a day at the park. What is it? Golden Gate Park. Which is like Chicago where they have the waterfront on Lake Michigan. It’s just park for so many miles. That’s what they have down there.

Karen: Of course, you can see the Golden Gate from anywhere in the park, which is what makes it remarkable. You were kind of taken with. You were taken with the Japanese Tea Garden. I was very surprised.

David: Well, that was gorgeous.

Karen: It was gorgeous. It was so peaceful. It was gorgeous.

David: And then I remember being on the paddle boat. Randall and his fiancé Judith, they were in the front paddling. They were paddling. And all we had was…

Karen: Throw breadcrumbs.

David: Our son is a bird watcher, a bird lover. And he would name the different ducks as they came.

Karen: They’d be like 25, 30 little ducks following us because we were spreading stuff from a little package of food, you know, crackers and stuff like that.

David: Yeah, you could buy there and I thought to myself, these ducks really like us. And then when we ran out of food, they didn’t seem to like us.

Karen: But what was so charming about that was that Randall could name all of the ducks. Oh my goodness. It was just like it was a personal tour. It was just extraordinary. Beautiful, beautiful moment to share.

David: It was wonderful. It’s amazing how just having time without responsibility feeds your soul.

Karen: Yeah, it does.

David: And a great way you sit down and you think, “Well, I need to eat. Should I eat half of this when you have to speak after all the people have eaten?” Didn’t have to think about any of that.

Karen: Yeah, it was lovely.

David: So grateful for family and friends who participated in that. Felt very undeserving.

Karen: So what are we going to talk about today?

David: Well, we’re going to talk about that matter.

Karen: Being grateful.

David: Being grateful. One of your early sermons, you wouldn’t call it a sermon.

Karen: Well, this one was a sermon I preached at Jericho Road Church, Sunday, 18th, 2012.

David: Oh, it’s about 10 years ago.

Karen: Right. I haven’t preached a lot of sermons, but this one I was asked to do by this church. And the title of it is A New Drug for Health and Happiness.

David: A new drug for health and happiness. Okay, that sounds interesting. You’re not going to preach the sermon, right?

Karen: No.

David: Okay. You’re just looking at it because you think it’s appropriate in this season of Thanksgiving.

Karen: So let’s start this way. If I told you that a new prescription drug had just come on the market, which had been trialed over the decades and that scientists had discovered the regular usage of which would enable the user to reach a state of well-being, a drug that would help people. Would you be interested in that drug?

David: Yeah, it’s going to bring well-being in my life. I’d be interested. Depends on how big the pill is.

Karen: It’s an interesting thing that’s happened in the psychological research community. And this has come out of this new twist. It used to be that they would study psychology. Would look at the pathologies. What was wrong with the human makeup or human progress or lack of progress? What was wrong with humanity’s psychology? Then about the year 2000, someone came up with the bright idea of why don’t we study what’s right or what’s healthy?

David: There were early books about that. I remember the Traits of a Healthy Family.

Karen: Yeah, we launched on to that instead of looking at what’s wrong with them.

David: But they had to be in the 1990s. We were in our reading anyway ahead of time, weren’t we?

Karen: Well, we did a lot of broadcasts on that too because it’s such an extremely helpful tool to be able to measure what traits of a healthy family existed and which ones your families, if you were a part of a family, exemplified your family. So anyway, around 2000, social scientists began turning their focus from abnormal psychology to healthy emotional habits and their impact on the way we live. So that became a focus and that’s a really interesting study to move from abnormality to health. I’m just going to read this paragraph from Wikipedia. “A large body of recent work suggests that people who are more grateful…“

David: Okay, good. You’ve got the connection.

Karen: Yeah, I got the connection. “Have higher levels of well-being. They’re studying these in trials. Grateful people are happier.”

David: So there’s not really a pill we’re going to take to learn to be grateful.

Karen: We’re going to take the pill of gratefulness. “Grateful people are happier, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives and with their social relationships.”

David: So it’s not saying Christian people, but it’s saying grateful people. Whether they’re Christian or so. The topic is gratitude.

Karen: “Grateful people also have higher levels of control of their environment. When things don’t work ideally, they don’t go under because something bad has happened. They have more control of their environments, of their personal growth, of their own purpose in life, and they have a high level of self-acceptance.” Interesting.

David: Yeah, it is interesting. Okay, so gratitude is what we’re zeroing on.

Karen: This is the pill.

David: That was your, I always say, what’s the topic of this sermon? When I listened, what was he talking, what was she talking about? So I got in.

Karen: A new drug for health and happiness. Okay. Let me just read a little bit more from Wikipedia. “Grateful people have more positive ways of coping with the difficulties they experience in life. They are less likely to try and avoid the problem. Deny there is a problem. Blame themselves or cope with their problem by substance abuse or using substances. Grateful people sleep better. And this seems to be because they think less negative and more positive thoughts before just going to sleep.” Okay, fascinating.

David: This is great. That’s, well, there’s a difference there. People think positive. You’re saying grateful. So people who say, “Thank you.”

Karen: Yes.

David: People who thank the Lord as a part of that, I’m sure. I don’t know if that comes out in the studies, but gratitude for life and for the God who gives us our life, that kind of thing. Okay.

Karen: Well, there is a pattern of gratitude, you know, that we need to be developing. It’s like any good habit. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And the more the benefit of it you see impacting your life. So one suggestion that came out of these psychological studies was that people begin what’s called an appreciation audit. So, and one of these studies, the idea of an appreciation audit was developed by Dr. Baker, and he was the director of behavioral medicine at the National Center for Preventive and Stress Medicine. So this is his work is to see how negative things affect humans and how positive things affect humans. And this was one of the positive things he looked at. He cite studies that the brain cannot process both fear and appreciation at the same time, or a negative attitude and a positive attitude. He recommended that learners who are trying to develop positive thinking habits form an audit, an appreciation audit. Reserve three minutes, preferably three times a day. Now that’s nothing. The problem is remembering to do it. You get up in the morning and you do three minutes.

David: Or it’s built into another habit. Another habit. I would say that I pray regularly twice a day. And those are times when things…

Karen: An appreciation audit.

David: I think of it as Thanksgiving. But gratitude is a part of that. Yeah, okay. But if you’re not a praying person, you have to say, “Okay, some kind of a ding, ding, ding, ding.

Karen: It needs to go on.

David: I got three minutes now to think of what I’m grateful for.

Karen: Well, this is a little meditative exercise too. He’s turned it into not only three minutes, three times a day, which seems pretty simple. But he says that when you’re in those three minutes, three times a day, you need to think about something you appreciate.

And you keep your mind focused on whatever that is until you feel the beauty of gratefulness rising. So we’ve had family gatherings. It was kind of interesting with the COVID year, trying to get everyone together and who had their vaccines and who was wearing masks and all of that sort of stuff. But when you sit and think how lovely it was to connect as a family when we’ve been through this almost two years of COVID and not able to connect the way we have in the past. And then just to think of that person, you had that time to talk about and how wonderful they are and how much you love them and how delightful it was to have that conversation or how connected you feel that’s taking that moment of appreciation and developing it into something where the beauty of gratefulness begins to rise and you say, “Oh, I’m so thankful that we had that.”

David: And you’re using we now instead of me. I think that it’s harder just to sit down and say, “Okay, I got three minutes. What am I grateful for?” But if someone is there with you to talk that out as a husband and wife or friends, whatever.

Karen: It increases the impact.

David: I would say it would. Yeah, I don’t know that I can prove that, but I would think so.

Karen: So the researchers then who were looking at health in humans, what caused health and brought health and what were the positive aspects of such a study of such as being grateful then came up with three big benefits of being thankful every day.

David: Okay, I’m ready.

Karen: Gratitude is literally one of the few things that can measurably impact people’s lives. It can be measured. So according to the studies, being thankful or being grateful improves your health. Like I said, if I had a pill, would you take it? That guarantee that you would be happy. When a group of organ transplant patients were asked to keep a daily gratitude journal, well another group of transplant patients simply wrote about the basic details of their day, the group that regularly listed that they were grateful and what they were grateful for scored significantly higher on measures of both physical and mental health.

So this is data gathering, these control tests that the scientific medical community puts forward in a lot of different ways. So that number one, they can determine that being thankful actually improves your health. You think it’s worth being grateful? I think so.

David: Yeah, you’ve got a customer who’s already been sold on this. But I wasn’t always this way.

Karen: No, this is true.

David: Gratitude, sincere gratitude, it’s something you practice. It’s only like pills in the sense that you got to take the pill every day.

Karen: You got to do it every day. So number two, being thankful connects you with other people. Research found that gratitude is also important in committed relationships like marriage or friendships, family relationships. They studied marriages. 65 couples were studied and researchers discovered that those who are most committed and satisfied with their marriage corresponded with couples who express gratitude with one another. So they could measure it in the satisfaction levels of that relationship. People have said, “I’m so grateful for you.” “It’s wonderful to have you as my husband,” which I say to you and you say to me, that husband, my wife. This happens all the time in our married life. But those people are more connected. That then translates over to our relationships with our friends and family and neighbors. When we are grateful for and express that gratitude to those people, those relationships also are better than when we don’t do that.

David: All these studies are not related to church things at all.

Karen: No, this is in the scientific community. Being thankful can change your attitude in life. And I saw this in my own life. I think that I had a tendency when I was younger to be negative and judgmental and critical. And I think that’s often where youth lands. And at some point in my life, I was challenged, perhaps by the Holy Spirit or something I read or maybe a combination of things to begin to think positively, to begin to be grateful for the gifts that had been given to me instead of upset that we didn’t have as much money or I wasn’t traveling as much as my sister-in-law or any of those little things that creep in and make us feel negative. Or cranky church members when we were in the pastorate at the time this was happening where you begin to get a negative attitude toward them. So to be grateful, to turn from that accounting of all the bad things and turn to a point in my life where I began to just not ignore what was wrong, but to look more instead at what was right and what was positive, but then to be grateful, to be deeply, deeply, deeply thankful for the life that God had given me for our marriage, for ministry that was meaningful, for the fact that I had begun to write and people were interested in publishing my writing. These things were just extraordinary in my life and that turn was huge.

David: So say someone is listening to us and says, “Why don’t you try to put into a sentence, what your wife is saying?”

Karen: Good luck, buddy.

David: I’m working on it while you’re talking. Those who practice gratitude discover a powerful medicine that cures much of what ails them.

Karen: Oh, I think that’s wonderful. Do it again. Say it again.

David: Those who practice gratitude discover a powerful medicine that cures much of what ails them. Took you a good 10 minutes to say all that and I can say it in a sentence. I’m grateful for your efforts today and amplification.

Karen: Let’s give some suggestions as to how tos maybe. Okay. How do you do this?

David: Well, I would say that I’ve kind of hinted at this already. I mostly do it through my prayer time, especially now that I don’t have the responsibilities that I once carried. I have two set aside prayer times each day and a part of that is taking the gratitude pill substitute. I find that meaningful. So in a sense, I’m saying it to God, but I do it that way. I also try to practice, especially within the family to say to them, “I really appreciate what you do.”

I’m not as good at it as I could be, but I’m better than I used to be. That was true even on the trip. I would try to say to myself, “Okay, what should I say to Nathaniel?”

Karen: One of our grandsons.

David: Yeah. What do I say to Jen? That is not palaver. Palaver, you sniff that out pretty fast, I think.

Karen: It’s saying things because you’re supposed to say positive things, but you don’t really mean it. Yeah, that’s what falaver.

David: Yeah, your mouth flaps. But the person hears and will understand your sincerity and appreciate it. I’ve found that through my life, I mean, most people don’t get the gratitude that they deserve.

Karen: Right.

David: It’s unfortunate, and we’re hopefully not those who add to the problem, but those who help alleviate the problem.

Karen: I think one of the nicest things that we can do when we’re expressing gratitude to someone else is to make sure it’s not just a throwaway comment. “Gee, thanks for all you’ve done.” But to draw them inside and say, “I want to tell you, I really appreciate your help. I wouldn’t have gotten through this the way I did without you stepping in and giving me a hand.” To make a point of it rather than just a casual comment.

David: I’m in a position now, I’m back, and when you come back from two weeks away, you kind of get a pile of things that you’re trying to catch up on. But most of these people who gave very generously for us to go on the trip, I didn’t even know who they were until the day before we left. I knew the trip was coming up, but now I’m at the place where I need to write letters to them, and it’s not going to be a stock letter. So I will think through what I want to say and make sure that they understand this was very meaningful to me.

Karen: I think one of the greatest things I’ve ever done in terms of learning to be grateful was I’ve kept prayer journals for 40 years, and they’re just eight and a half by 11 spiral ring notebooks. And I just recently started reading the old ones, you know, the early efforts at prayer journaling. But I always start with a list of things I’m grateful for.

Now that’s gone on for 40 years. I was going to throw the journals away once I’d read them. I don’t want my kids to have to bother with them and they’re taking up a whole shelf in the closet. I could use it for other things. But when I looked at those prayer journals and saw the record of God’s work in our lives, in the lives of the people we love, it was just powerful to remember again how much he had walked with us and how present he had been in our lives. And of course, every single one of my entries begins with a list of things that I’m grateful for. It was just a habit I started when I started journal keeping.

Every single day that I prayer journal, and I journal most of the days of my life, there’s a list of eight to 12 things that I am grateful for. I will give testimony to the fact that this radically changes who we are as people. It radically changes those terrible negating feelings we have about ourselves, self-loathing. That the enemy loves to get in there and nip at our souls out so that we kind of hate ourselves for the things that we’ve done wrong or poorly. But gratitude, this aspect of thanking God for what he’s done, how he’s used us, the lessons he has taught us when we fail, the fact that even when we fail, he still loves us. That’s all recorded in those 40 years of journal keeping. And it’s a very powerful testament to the fact that it will heal everything that ails you practically if you practice being grateful.

David: I know that you said it well. I’m just thinking every so often the church, where I was raised anyway, there would be someone that would say, “Do we have a testimony? Can you testify to what I’ve been saying?”

Karen: And we need more of that telling, it’s another kind of appreciation audit but done in the congregation of the righteous, right?

David: You’ve given the testimony, ma’am. I think we can leave it there.

Outro: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address. hosts@BeforeWeGo.show. That’s all lowercase letters. hosts@BeforeWeGo.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2021 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.