The Gratitude That Broke Me Open
A Wayward Purpose Thanksgiving Reflection on Faith
This is the Wayward Reflections series, our space to process life out loud. Writing helps me process my thoughts and understand what I actually believe, so I share it here, where we focus on faith, discipline, direction, and the journey from moral injury to moral leadership. If it helps you, take it. If you think it will help others, share it. We are grateful you’re here either way.
Where Gratitude Actually Begins
Gratitude is weird.
People talk about gratitude like it’s a gentle thing.
Something you can just flick on when the weight of the year presses down.
But for some of us, gratitude starts in the places where things first went sideways and is more than being thankful for something.
This week, an image of my mother and me appeared in a folder on my computer that I thought was long lost, and it brought back some old memories.
I was in what I still consider middle school. My wife insists it was elementary school, but this is my reflection, so I’m choosing my own timeline.
The image reminded me of a visit to a big-box outlet store. The humming fluorescent lights illuminated the scene as I watched my mother’s quick and careful hands swap price tags, almost like defusing a bomb. Her aim was to make sure her kids left with the clothes they wanted, all while managing a tight budget. My mother justified her actions by saying she wasn’t stealing, just taking advantage of store discounts.
I wanted JNCO jeans (look them up), something out of my mother’s price range, those baggy denim parachutes worn by kids who didn’t have many other ways to signal they were hurting.
For me, those jeans were more than an interesting fashion statement; they were armor. Denim between my skin and the wooden paddle with holes drilled in it, the one that waited by my mom and stepdad’s chairs, always within reach if I slipped up.
Gratitude doesn’t always start in the good times.
Sometimes it starts in the mess, in the sharp edges and noise that teach us to scan every detail, to pay attention, or get hurt.
Growing up, I spent many childhood moments silently standing at checkout counters, witnessing my mother lie, steal, and cheat, while I pretended not to notice. I learned early to bite my tongue and accept wrongdoings without speaking out.
Therapy helped me realize this isn’t just a memory but a foundational cause of the deep moral injury I still feel today. Whenever I sense something is wrong, or detect injustice or dishonesty, that old pain resurfaces.
The unresolved grief, the unprocessed wrongs, and the fear that kept me focused on simply keeping my mother alive created a mental container I dwelled in for years. Now, as an adult, that container manifests as a persistent urge to fix, to make things right, and to break free from the silence I once endured.
Learning the Wrong Lessons
My mother had friends who “worked the system,” and taught her to do it as well. And from a young age, she taught me that life was all about myself. This was a challenging belief I had to battle against, and it created a toxic mindset that I carried into my early adulthood. Over the past 20 years, I've been on a long journey to unlearn this perspective.
She couldn’t afford new shoes or clothes for us, but she could lie, cheat, and steal with expert-level pattern recognition. Looking back, I wish she’d used her smarts for something better. Or gave us a community more focused on serving and doing good, rather than on self-preservation and working the system for self-interest.
If I wanted a shirt from Brand ‘X’, she’d scour the racks for a cheaper shirt with the same brand tag and swap them.
Twenty dollars became five.
Luxury became survival.
Survival became normal.
She didn’t teach this because she was mean or bad. She accidentally taught it because she was desperate. Her love came out as survival, even when it left bruises.
In trying to make her kids happy, she planted a mustard seed that split me in two:
The boy who was learning to justify whatever kept the peace, and the man whose moral compass is now so rigid that it sometimes tips into being a weakness.
And this is where gratitude quietly arises, almost unnoticed at the time, as if something else was forming beneath the surface, waiting to reveal itself. Those rough beginnings and witnessing what no kid should ever have to see from a parent left a space in me that eventually allowed something good in.
The Rollercoaster Without Guardrails
This week, an aunt said something that made me think:
“Life is a rollercoaster, and you need guardrails.”
She meant it as an example of guardrails for life, but it stuck with me as a reflection of what I mostly grew up without. My aunt’s comment reminds me of the Christian man who built roller coasters not for the thrill, but to jolt people awake, away from hedonism, a shock to the system.
Parents distracted.
Kids spinning.
Screens raising households.
No smartphones yet, just that new home computer lighting up the room like a slot machine.
Our generation swapped newspapers and clunky desktop computers for tablets and phones.
Growing up without relational guardrails does the same thing. It definitely shook me awake, making me memorize every twist before it came. It made me predict the turns.
Brace for the drop. Learn everyone’s mood before my own.
When you grow up without safety or predictability, your body learns to tense before your mind even catches up.
We learn to read a room faster than we learn to read our own bodies.
My mother was so focused on her own survival, feeling like the world was out to get her. Over time, she began to believe that everything was someone else's fault or problem. She became so intent on controlling everything herself that she forgot she was raising children and planting seeds every day. This gradually affected her relationships, and she lost sight of seeing everyone around her as individuals with their own stories.
I've often wondered why, after all our long conversations, she would come to realize she needed to change. That she needed to do the work, and in some cases, we even set up a plan to transform her life when she got home, only to find that it didn't happen.
These experiences were my first real lessons in faith, discipline, and direction, and in how these elements impact not just me but also my family and community.
That’s where the light switch comes in.
When Faith Flips the Switch
I remember one night when the house suddenly went dark. At first, I panicked, fumbling for the light switch. But after a few frantic seconds, I realized the power was actually out. Later, when the electricity returned, the lights flicked back on instantly. I now realize, in theory, that the light had been ready the entire time.
The wiring was good.
The power was waiting just beyond the wall.
The moment the current was restored, the room came to life.
I now view Grace as like that current. Always ready, always present.
Faith is like the switch. The small action that lets the light pour into the room.
That night, when the power went out and life was disrupted, it can be a lot like trying to pray for the first time after something challenging happens and the light doesn't turn on right away.
But if we leave the switch on, God will show up when He's ready, and more importantly, when He knows you are ready. When the switch is on, Grace has a way of entering your life. If it's still off, you'll need to put in the effort and have the faith, discipline, and direction to turn it on, opening yourself to grace and support.
This past year, during my own faith journey, I learned the Church has a name for my thought:
Ex opere operantis. It means the power is already flowing, but the light only comes on when we flip the switch. We have to show up and take part in the Grace for it to change us. The grace is real and present, but it shines only when we place our hand on the switch.
We don’t generate the power.
We just cooperate with it.
This connection between grace and action shows me why gratitude is so transformative.
Gratitude is often the first step in flipping the switch that lights the path to grace.
What I Carried Into Adulthood
I grew up in chaos. I learned to see in the dark, to survive there, long before I ever found the courage to reach for the light. Healing hasn’t been some grand, cinematic moment for me. It’s been slow, hard, ordinary work. Almost like the way we used to sit on the floor with a tangled cassette tape, feeding the loose ribbon back into the reel with nothing but a pencil, patience, and time. You couldn’t rush it. You couldn’t skip it. You just carefully rewound what had been pulled out, knowing the sound might never be perfect again. But the music was still there.
For a generation that never had to fight with a cassette tape, I feel like healing today is more like when your phone glitches and every app keeps crashing. You can’t just swipe it away. You need to close everything, clear out the background noise, and maybe even restart the whole device.
And even then, after an update, some data might be corrupted. But the core system, the part of you that was built with purpose, is still intact. It just needs a reset, not a replacement.
We tend to learn beliefs like:
People leave. People lie. People change.
I’m too much.
My needs don’t matter.
I must stay one step ahead.
Hope is dangerous.
I want someone to look at me and not see damage.
I’ve been surviving so long, I don’t know how to live.
These aren’t just lies. They’re survival skills.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helped me untangle the lies early on. For instance, I once believed that asking for help was a sign of weakness, a lesson deeply ingrained over years of navigating chaos alone.
Through CBT, I learned to recognize this as a distortion.
Therapy guided me to see vulnerability as a strength and reaching out as a courageous step toward healing, shifting my beliefs fundamentally. And sometimes, reaching out just meant talking to a trusted friend, someone at church, or a stranger on the internet.
But some wounds didn’t live in my head. Some settled deeper, where words couldn’t reach. Some scars were moral, some spiritual, the kind that ache in our bones and keep us up at night.
Childhood trauma and adult moral injury create a double rupture.
As kids, our shield was never built. As adults, we blame ourselves for failing to use the shield we never had.
One wound is innocence betrayed.
The other is responsibility distorted.
Together, they create a fracture that feels spiritual as much as psychological.
And both teach the same lie: You’re on your own.
But we aren’t.
Not in the eyes of God, and not in the eyes of a community willing to become gracious to each other
Faith as the Regulator We Never Had
Lately, I have dove into Linehan’s biosocial theory, the “why am I like this?” question so many of us carry.
Here’s what I found:
Some of us are born emotionally vulnerable.
Some of us have impulsive wiring (hello, ADHD & neurodiversity).
Some of us were raised in environments that didn’t know how to validate us.
Some of us were just different from everyone around us.
Invalidation isn’t always malicious.
Most people did what they could with what they had, even if it left us hungry for something more, or something else we could not communicate. But when your environment can’t regulate you, we learn to try to hold it together on our own, or we go up in flames.
And this is where faith enters the story.
Biosocial theory teaches us that regulation doesn’t magically appear and that we learn it through wise mind, through slowing down, through naming what’s real.
Moral injury, on the other hand, is what happens when our inner compass shatters, when we betray our own values or feel betrayed by people we trusted to safeguard them.
Faith becomes the bridge between the two.
Because faith reminds us that we are not the sum of our ruptures, our emotions are not our identity, and our failures are not final.
Faith is the ultimate “wise mind.”
The still, steady presence that says, we can return to who we were created to be. And moral injury begins to heal not when we erase the past, but when we finally let grace regulate what trauma dysregulated.
When we stop white-knuckling our way through life alone, and let God rebuild the internal authority we lost.
Faith doesn’t replace the work.
Faith powers the work.
Grace enters when we turn on the light switch.
Ex opere operantis.
Faith That Works (Not Words Alone)
James said it plainly: Faith without works is dead.
“For just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.” (James 2:26 USCCB NABRE)
Not because works earn Grace, as I once misunderstood, but because our works are the fruit of Grace already at work within us.
Dr. David Jeremiah puts it this way: You don’t need to know every answer; you just need to move. Take the next faithful step. Reach out. Serve. Love. Do the thing right in front of you.
Grace is already in the wiring. Doing the work is reaching out, hand on the light switch, ready to let the light in. Faith isn’t about how you feel. It’s about what you do. Even in fog, even when crawling through uncertainty, every small act of trust closes the loop.
So, this year, something deeper shifted inside me. Not a rejection of who I am or what I still serve, but I’m rethinking what matters most. What am I thankful for? What am I grateful for? Where does gratitude show up in my life now?
I still wear the uniform.
I still serve proudly.
I still enjoy the work I am blessed to do every day.
I am still grateful for those I am entrusted to lead.
And I still salute.
But for the first time in my life,
I find myself bowing deeper.
I have slowly traded the salute for the genuflection.
My morality no longer hangs on institutions, but on God.
The salute shaped my career.
The kneeling is what’s shaping my soul now.
The Lamp We Carry: Gratitude as Light
So I end this reflection where I started. Gratitude isn’t a mood. It’s a movement of the soul. It’s the smallest hinge that turns the whole door toward God.
And lately, I’ve realized it’s also the first step in healing moral injury. The wound that lies to us and tries to tell us that we should have known better, done better, been better.
But gratitude cuts through that lie.
Gratitude reminds us we are not abandoned to our wiring or our past. We are not abandoned to what others do to us, or in front of us.
Grace is already in the circuitry.
Faith is the switch.
And gratitude is the hand that reaches for it.
We’re wired for light, even if we grew up in shadows. Grace is present, even if we don’t feel it. And the work, the slow, complex, and ordinary work of healing, is what makes the light finally shine.
Today, as I look back on where I’ve been and where I’m going, here’s what I’m ultimately grateful for:
For a mother who tried through broken means.
For the denim armor that helped a boy survive.
For therapy that gave me language.
For the sacraments that gave me direction.
For the Church that gave me a way home.
For a God who waited in the dark until I was ready to see.
For faith that steadies.
For discipline that strengthens.
For direction that anchors.
For the purpose of refusing to let moral injury have the last word.
And I’m grateful for you. For showing up, for reading, for walking this Wayward road with me, with us, for proving that no one heals alone.
Could you flip the switch? Let grace do what it’s been waiting to do for you?
The power is already there.
The light is already yours.
And gratitude…quiet, steady, stubborn; is how we turn toward it, again and again.
Take care, everyone. And until next time, remember the quiet truths that God walks with you, none of us heal alone, and none of us walk this Wayward road by ourselves.