Thanks Giving

Happy Thanksgiving!!! I have already put my turkey on and prepared all my sides yesterday. House is clean, table almost set , desserts survived the night with no one sneaking any! Yes, everything will come together easily for our Thanksgiving feast today. We will be well-prepared for our thanks giving.
I LOVE Thanksgiving. Love the whole week off to spend with my people. Love the eating, lazing, and visiting. Love the talking of preparing for Christmas. But I especially love the whole idea of giving thanks for our blessings. I love the meditating on all there is to be thankful for in my life. I find it interesting that this time of year makes it so easy to reflect and be thankful because, well... that's what you do on Thanksgiving. I try so hard to not just be thankful for the easy stuff. You know....husband, health, family, job, friends.........etc. Those things are the easy things to be thankful for. Well, most days. :).

I then started to think about how I live the rest of the year. Some days an outsider might not think I was so filled with gratitude. I looked up several passages on thanks yesterday and one stood out because it warned about unthankfulness.

Romans 1:21
"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."

Ouch! This speaks to the believer. It speaks to me. What about all the rest of time when the spirit of Thanksgiving is not wafting throughout the air, facebook, the twitterverse? What about then? What about when my days are lousy, when the unexpected throws my plans all awry? How then do I glorify God and thank Him. Oh so many times I struggle with being thankful for the blessing, instead of focusing on the Blessor. And He is so worthy of all our praise and thanks. 

My precious father-in-love has been in the hospital for two months and five days. He came to see our sweet Caroline the day she was born, became ill at the hospital and has not gone home yet. Nor has he seen his sweet great-granddaughter yet. He is very ill. Yet, his spirits are always good. He is the toughest person I know. He keeps the doctors baffled daily on how he is still breathing after every hurdle he has been through. But he is. And he has not stopped thanking God or giving Him glory one time. Or sharing Him with those he comes in contact with. My sweet mother-in-love travels back and forth several times a day to see him (he has been in ICU a great deal of the time). It has been so hard on her, yet she doesn't complain. Nor does she fail to give thanks to God and says repeatedly it is all in His hands and we trust that even though we don't understand it now. What a beautiful blessing they are to all of us. Their strength, their devotion to each other, to our family is one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced. At a time when it would be easy to be frustrated or their thinking become futile, they choose to thank God. They thank the Blessor for Who He is not what it seems He is doing. What a legacy.

I am sure the reason for that is the same reason we should all give thanks today.
1 Corinthians 15:57
"But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Because of the indescribable gift given us at Calvary, we can persevere through this tough old world with Hope, with Thanks giving because in the end, we win. So today I will be thankful for all the family, friends, etc... but I am asking God to show me how to be thankful in the hard stuff. Where is He in all of that, because you can know He is. Help me to see beauty in the ashes.

We will feast in a big way today. We will load up and take a sampling of all we have to my sweet father-in-love. And we will be thankful. Thankful for a God Who gives us each other and Who loves us.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Michelle