When your kids grow up, leave home and invite you over for Thanksgiving, it’s a mixed blessing. It’s a whole lot easier, for sure, but I do miss having leftovers to munch on for days and days … and days.
Having gone to my son’s house to feast this year, my fridge is now woefully lacking the leftover turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, cranberries, and pumpkin pie we usually gorge on until we can scarcely stand them anymore. But was the trade-off worth it? Oh yeah.
Besides, if Thanksgiving becomes all about the food and I need a Paula Deen meal served on a Martha Stewart table to prompt me to be thankful, there’s something wrong.
Thanksgiving—the holiday—may have been over when we headed home from my son’s on Thursday, but thanksgiving—the attitude—should never end.
So, why is it a struggle to remain consciously thankful every day?
Two years ago, in this very space in this very newspaper, I wrote these words: “I want to suggest that for the next year, from this Thanksgiving until next, we all choose to be consciously thankful for something, or many things, every day, no matter what.”
Two months later, I wrote this confession: “I wrote about living thankfully just two months ago, when our calendars reminded us it was ‘officially’ time to give thanks. I challenged us in that November column to be grateful for something, or many things, every single day. I said it could change us. I believed it, wrote it, and then forgot it. I’m ashamed to admit that after issuing the ‘Thanksgiving challenge,’ I let that powerful, transforming discipline slip out of my life.”
After that very public admission, I did what my techno-savvy husband tells me to do every time my computer messes up: I rebooted. I rebooted my brain and heart to again purposefully, consciously be thankful every day. In fact, I bought a notebook and started writing down big and little things to be thankful for.
Through more heartaches, countless frustrations and three more surgeries, I kept listing blessings.
I didn’t always want to. Even with a full stomach in a warm house in a safe place with a loving family in the best nation on this planet, I’m ashamed to admit it’s sometimes hard to pull out my thankful list and start writing. But I’ve been determined not to trip over blessings without stopping to notice them or fail to thank the good God who gives them (James 1:17).
If I did this perfectly, I could’ve recorded many, many thousands since my “reboot” in February, 2013. As it is, this morning my list contained 1300. Some of my listings are duplicates, but that’s okay.
In my column two years ago, I mentioned my friend Wendy, a cancer survivor who sees a rainbow out of her kitchen window in Hawaii every day, but acts every time like it’s the first rainbow she’s ever seen.
Every blessing becomes new when we appreciate it anew.
Pastor/author James MacDonald says, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
In a culture that teaches us to say “more,” not “thanks,” let’s swim upstream.
Let’s measure life not by what we’ve lost, but by what we’ve learned. Not by what we’re missing, but by what we have. Not by what is wrong, but by what is right.
It will definitely change us, probably those around us, and maybe even our world.
Happy ThanksLIVING!