Oh to be Steeped in Gratitude

On Sunday evening Jenelle and Blake and I went to my mom's. My brother was there also, and we had a nice evening hanging around the table and chatting it up. Mom was excited about the fact that some people had stopped in on Friday and shared a letter with her from an acquaintance that they discovered, who had been in the same refugee camp as she had been eighty years ago. He had gone back to visit the refugee camp last year.

For those of you who don't know, my mother's childhood took place in West Prussia, Germany and Denmark during World War II. Towards the end of the war my grandmother fled with my mom and her siblings to Denmark. Denmark had been invaded by Germany in 1940 and surrendered within hours and agreed to cooperate with Hitler's demands. In doing so they unsuspectingly were able to smuggle most of the Jewish people to Sweden and out of harm's way. In 1943, they started resisting against Germany which led to a much harsher crackdown on the country, but with the help of the allied forces they regained their independence in 1945.

After the war, refugee camps were set up in Denmark for the many displaced people, especially the Germans that were displaced by the downsizing of Germany and the expulsion of Germans from the East and outlying areas of Germany that were given to Poland. The commander of the Polish army briefed their soldiers to "exact on the Germans what they enacted on us, so they will flee on their own and thank God they saved their own lives." 

The Russian army's retaliation was even worse, with mass rapes and killings of German civilians. The horror stories that came from the refugees fleeing ahead of the Communists caused more and more people to flee.

And so my mom's family fled. They ended up in Denmark in the refugee camps with their last camp being in Oksbol Refugee camp. God's protection in her story itself is amazing and you can read it in her book, A Place For Ruth . It can be purchased on Amazon or lots of other places.

But what I wanted to bring up is what Mom read in this letter that had her excited.

The guy wrote about returning to the camp. “Our time there was a time steeped in gratitude! Although the Danes suffered greatly during the occupation of Germany, they took in thousands of us German refugees and cared for them for years.”

My mom has always been a gracious and thankful person. One could look at her life and say that what she was dealt as a child was unfair, giving her the right to complain and to be unhappy. And maybe her childhood wasn't great, but mom always chose the opposite, to be thankful and appreciative.

She mentioned that she had often heard others complaining about how the people in the camps were mistreated by the Danes. The focus was often on the fact that they were fed soup made from apple cores and other leftovers from the soldiers that guarded the camps. It was also said that the camp doctors didn't care about the refugees and just let everyone, especially the children, die.

Mom's perspective was different. After what the Germans did to the Danes, she felt that they were treated better than they could have expected. For a small country like Denmark to take on a half a million refugees after being ravaged by war wasn't an easy task. For one, there just wasn't a lot of food to go around. But there were individuals that cared. Moms little sister's life was saved by a nurse who took her home because she was so close to death that she wouldn't have survived in the camp. She kept her until she was strong enough to survive and brought her back to the camp. Two of her other siblings were hospitalized during that time and survived as well. There were a lot of children in that camp that didn't survive and for someone to be ungrateful is totally understandable.

But mom always seems to be thankful. She often talks about the games that they played in the camp with the other kids and how her mom made a ball by sewing a cover out of an old piece of cloth and stuffing it with newspaper, and they played with it for hours each day, or other games that they made up along the way.

Of course a child's perspective would be different than an adult's. And with that would probably come the feelings of guilt for finding joy while others were feeling so down.

For me to see that she was excited to hear that there were others in that camp that were grateful, that there were others who found joy in focusing on the blessings instead of the bad things, was really encouraging to me. 

How does that relate with us today? With all that's going on in the world today, I think it's worth taking some time to seek out those thankful and grateful souls around us. Not only will they encourage us to find a similar perspective in our own plight, but they will also help us to find joy.

As individuals, we'll probably never be able to do something big enough to solve the world's problems. But with the right perspective and attitude focused in the right places and on individual people, our perspectives and actions can totally make the difference in someone else's life. 

And if helping someone else doesn't help you find joy, no matter where your situation finds you, maybe being thankful will.

And hopefully we can all look back, focusing on the good things, and find that our hearts are steeped in gratitude!