For example, on a thread on Facebook just this past week, one Christian woman insisted it was her constitutional right to oppose and her mandate to speak up whenever something was wrong.

Another insists it is his responsibility to point out sin wherever he sees it. (I asked for his mailing address so I could send him a mirror but he wouldn’t give it to me.)

Any number of threads take issue with one point or another. They don’t like a phone call the president received. They are unhappy that not enough people say merry Christmas. Others complain that someone somewhere is being suppressed, oppressed, or depressed…and that not enough of us are distressed enough about their suppression, oppression, and depression.

Some years ago I was invited to speak at a church in a suburb of Toronto. Staying in a spare room in the pastor’s home, I witnessed a most amazing…and disturbing exhibition. Every evening, the entire family sat around the living room, all facing their mother (the pastor’s wife) who occupied a chair all by itself on the opposite wall. There she passed judgment on everything anyone said and what they spoke of. She did not like this, thought that was wrong, insisted that this one thing and another be changed, attacked, adjusted, or outright eliminated. Every evening for 5 nights is was the same thing – an outpouring of negativity and unhappiness the likes of which I had seldom seen.

I learned a few years later that the family had split up, the couple had divorced. I am not surprised. No relationship can survive an onslaught of negativity, ingratitude, and unhappiness like that. No matter what there was always something wrong and the wrongness of anything eventually became the failure of everything.

I challenged my church that November morning that if they did not cut the chains of ingratitude and negativity, not even God himself could help them. It was a prison of their own making in which they lived. An incessant fountain of guile will poison any life and unfortunately the lives of those around them.

Tragically, the church I used to pastor has become the world in which we live.

There seems to be a need within most of us to pursue an ideal, to admire perfection. But the ideal cannot exist and perfection is almost never to be manifest. The pursuit of ideal social constructs (utopian communities) is not new. We can or at least should learn that they never work. No economic system is perfect. There are always inefficiencies and inequalities. So what?

The difference lies in the focus and the intent. For those in that church, their focus was on their discontent and their intent was to wallow in it. Given the failure of my thirty days of thanks experiment, I suppose I should have followed up with a celebration of Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza who celebrated Festivus, you know the holiday for the rest of us. An aluminum pole is easy enough to get and celebrants were primed to take a moment to tell everyone else how those people had disappointed them, a key component of the Festivus ritual.

It is the insistence that we have the right to demand that things be right as we want them, and the insistence that we activate that right that poisons the well. Gratitude and thanksgiving does not imply passivity. We can work for good without fixating on bad. The writer of Peter’s first epistle was correct – if you really want to live good days (the writer is not implying that the days are utopian nirvana), then it is well within your power to do so. But if you do not, not even God Himself can help you..