I lost my job and my son. Here's what I learned about grace

Thanksgiving has a way of making us count our blessings.

We give thanks for the job, the house, our health, the food on the table and the people sitting around it. In church, we may thank God for opening doors, answering prayers and providing when we did not know how we were going to make it.

There is nothing wrong with being thankful for any of those things. But what happens when something that once appeared on your gratitude list disappears?

Can God still be good when the blessing is gone?

I had to confront that question when I lost my job.

I was disappointed with God. It is difficult for me to admit that because I knew better. I knew God had never promised me a life without hardship. I knew faith was not supposed to operate like a contract. But I also thought I had done everything I was supposed to do.

I went to school. I got good grades. I stayed out of trouble. I earned a college scholarship. I graduated, got good jobs and built valuable work experience. I went to church. I tithed.

I had followed the formula. Then I lost my job.

I did not shake my fist at God and demand to know why. I did not stop believing in Him. But I stopped tithing. At the time, I probably would not have described that decision as anger toward God. Looking back, I can see what was underneath it.

I had been giving to God while quietly expecting something in return. I thought faithfulness should count for something. If I worked hard, lived right, gave faithfully and tried to be a good person, shouldn't my life reflect that?

Eventually I had to confront an uncomfortable truth. God was not quid pro quo. I was a quid pro quo believer.

Somewhere along the way, I had turned faith into an unspoken transaction: Do the right things and God will bless you. Give and God will give back. Pray and God will answer. Be faithful and God will protect the life you have built.

We may never say those words aloud. But sometimes we live as though we believe them. Then life happens. The job disappears. The marriage ends. The diagnosis comes. The prayer seems unanswered. Someone we love dies. And suddenly it becomes much harder to count our blessings.

I know something about that kind of pain beyond losing a job. I lost my son.

There are experiences for which language seems inadequate, and losing a child is one of them. The pain was indescribable. There is no professional setback I could compare with it. No lost opportunity. No amount of money.

And yet that loss eventually made one of the central claims of my Christian faith feel different to me.

God gave His Son. I have heard John 3:16 for most of my life. It may be the most familiar verse in Christianity: God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son.

But after losing my own son, I could no longer hear those words the same way. I would not willingly give my son for anything. Nothing. Yet at the center of Christianity is a God who gives what I cannot imagine giving.

That is grace. Not a reward for good behavior. Not payment for tithing. Not a guarantee that tragedy will pass over our homes because we have been faithful.

Losing my job had exposed something about my faith that I had not recognized when everything was going well. I had confused God's blessings with God's goodness. If God's goodness depends on my circumstances — my job, my family's safety, my prayers being answered exactly as I hoped — then God becomes good or bad according to the weather of my life.

I no longer believe that. God was good when I had the job. God was still good when I lost it. God was present when life made sense. God was still present when absolutely nothing made sense.

That does not mean everything that happens is good. Some things hurt. Some things are devastating. Some things leave questions we may carry for the rest of our lives. Faith does not require us to pretend otherwise. Grief does not become less painful simply because we believe in God. Disappointment does not automatically mean we lack faith.

Sometimes faith is simply discovering that God is still there when everything we associated with being "blessed" is not.

That realization has changed what gratitude means to me. For much of my life, gratitude was connected to provision — thank you for the scholarship, the job, the house, the opportunity. Those are still worthy of gratitude. But they are also temporary. Jobs can disappear. Money can disappear. Circumstances change. And people we love can leave us far sooner than we ever imagined. If those things are the foundation of our gratitude, what happens when they are gone?

Maybe that is one of the harder questions worth asking this Thanksgiving.

We often go around the table naming what we are thankful for. But there may be someone sitting at that table who has had a terrible year. Someone may be unemployed. Someone may be grieving. Someone may be struggling financially. Someone may have prayed all year for something that never happened. Someone may be approaching an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table for the first time.

What does gratitude mean for them?

I would never tell someone in the middle of suffering that they simply need to be more thankful. I know enough about grief to know that pain does not need a cliché.

What I can share is what my own life has taught me. Sometimes the blessing is not that God prevents the valley. Sometimes the blessing is discovering that God is with us while we walk through it. That is a very different understanding of Thanksgiving — one where I can thank God for what He has provided without believing His goodness depends on keeping it.

I once thought blessing was evidence that I had been faithful and God had held up His end of the bargain.

Losing taught me something that receiving never could. There was never a bargain. God was never quid pro quo.

I was.

And grace has been teaching me the difference.