Thank Hashem Until No Time to Complain Remains
A person must habituate himself to always be thankful, and to express his thanks for everything he has—and this brings blessing in all areas.
One example:
A person has a child with whom he struggles terribly, whether spiritually or emotionally. Therapies and interventions are expensive, and while some efforts succeed, many efforts fail. And the suffering seems endless.... Surely, he is experiencing much agony as a result. But here is what we can tell him: You want to help the situation? Instead of giving thanks only for your other children who are going in the proper path, why don’t you try and give thanks for everything that is going right with this child? You see that the shefah has dried up in this area? Instead of complaining about it, why don’t you bring water—tears of thankfulness —and saturate it!
People who are bitter are preoccupied with what is lacking—so much so that they forget that they can do something about the lack.
Imagine that a person has a garden, and one area is dried up and not growing. The owner comes in every day and cries, “Ay... Yiddishe tzaros....” He davens and does all sorts of segulos for his garden to grow—forgetting that he has the ability to water his garden and see beautiful sprouts shoot out of the ground.
HaKadosh Baruch Hu gave you a life, and you see that something isn’t going well. Instead of focusing on what isn’t going well, give thanks for what is. The Kotzker Rebbe said, “I don’t ask that my yungeleit don’t sin; I want them not to have the time to sin!” Here, too, a person should be so preoccupied with giving thanks for what he has—that he doesn’t have any energy left to focus on what he doesn’t have. People will observe about him, “If he were to dwell on his problem, he would possibly be tempted to be bitter—but he hasn’t had the ability to dwell on the negative in a long time!
