Thanksgiving is done. The malls
along “over the river and through the woods” were already crowded with cars and
shoppers as we traveled across two state lines.
Facebook posts warned friends of places not to go as fights broke out in
lines at some store. How quickly we can
shift from gratitude to grabitude.
This Thanksgiving, the verse that stood out to me as I made my mental
lists of things for which I was thankful was Habakkuk 3: 17-19.
Though
the fig tree should not blossom,
nor
fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off the fold
and there be no herd in the
stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my
salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer's;
he makes me tread on my high places.
When we
recognize whom we thank, we realize that we truly can give thanks in all
things.
As Henri J.M. Nouwen said, “Gratitude ... goes beyond the "mine"
and "thine" and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In
the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the
awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived
as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge
that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be
celebrated with joy.”
On this day of frenzied shopping and commercialism run rampant, let’s
stop and extend our season of gratitude, celebrating all God’s gifts to us –
the ones we easily see and the ones for which we must discipline ourselves to
say thanks.
