One of the cruelest expressions of human selfishness is a failure to say thank you. Shakespeare pinpointed it in King Lear: "Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude."
The king was driven to the borders of insanity by his three daughters who repaid his spoiling of them by reducing him to poverty and homelessness.
"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, how sharper than the serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," raged Lear.
Even the best and most caring of homes can produce ungrateful offspring and it is simply not the case it has to be the parents' fault.
Therapists may tell us we are robots, mindlessly playing out the programming of our childhood conditioning, but the choice is always there, either to display gratitude or ingratitude to parents.
Tomorrow's psalm is the peerless 103rd, where King David recognises how easily he himself could get on that slippery slope of being a thankless child towards his Heavenly Father and how utterly inappropriate and culpable such a response would be.
It used to be the vogue to sing the hymn "Count your many blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done", and while words and music both verged on the naff, the theology remains both biblical and health-giving after the pattern of this psalm.
God's kindness towards us is limitless, we are daily showered with blessings, for he has been good to us in countless ways. He is the Father who is never overindulgent, disciplines us when we need it by negative experiences, and never gives us everything we want the moment we demand it.
Yet, as David recognised, men and women turn their backs on God just as Lear's daughters did on their father, ignoring his goodness by taking it all for granted without one thoughtful word of thanks and appreciation addressed in his direction.
Psalm 103 is both an ancient and modern prophylactic against such corrosive selfishness as David cautions himself: "Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits" then diligently works through an extensive check-list of reasons to be thankful.
Uppermost in the psalmist's mind is a recent phase in his life where he had grieved God and perceived that an ensuing illness was in some way a chastening from God. While there is no proportionality here in that suffering is not doled out according to guilt, sometimes disease and sin are undeniably linked.
Ulcers can come from deep-rooted anxiety related to guilt. The AIDS scourge has been fuelled in part by elements of sexual misbehaviour.
David went through the difficult process of confessing that his own moral failure had contributed to a life-threatening sickness.
Now, though, he can sing about the goodness of the God "who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desire with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's" (vs. 3-5).
To any charge that God is purely arbitrary in dealing with his people, David is categoric in his denial: "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love" (v.8).
Spiritual lukewarmness is endemic in a land like ours where being a Christian is part of respectability and tradition. Church-going becomes a habit, while saying "amen" may never involve really speaking to God, the reading of the Bible may wash over the mind without ever listening to God.
If our hearts are that cold and we make no appropriate emotional response to God for his gracious, unmerited goodness, then warning lights ought to be flashing.
No blessings to count? Really? Put your nose in Psalm 103 and let David do the arithmetic which will restore a genuine perspective. This God is of reluctant anger and generous mercy, immeasurable love and radical forgiveness, paternal tenderness and sympathetic understanding, unchanging character and everlasting grace.
Having worked through this lengthy catalogue of God's goodness, doubtless like the psalmist we will be prepared to pledge to the Lord a new obedience, a new respect and a new commitment and begin gratefully to count our blessings starting with the wonder of his pardoning grace towards those who have forgotten to say thank you.
G.F.