Think about Your Thanks

November is rather a weird time of year. The grass needs to be mowed a couple times more but you have to bundle yourself up to do it, hood, gloves and all. Your neighbor’s Halloween pumpkin is still grinning from his perch on the porch but the woman around the corner has already strung her Christmas lights – and turned them on. Stores are still trying to rid themselves of all remaining orange and black paraphernalia while hawking all the red and green. But just try to buy a pilgrim.

I’m going to risk sounding like a broken record (just using that term dates a person, doesn’t it? You know – those old-timey hard plastic disks that played a catchy tune when you put the needle down, but would repeat the same part over and over if there’s a broken spot? Well that’s me. I’ve said this all before). We tend to skip the grateful and just enjoy the “gimme.” I feel badly each year when we rush to carve our pumpkins, do the trick or treat thing and then run headlong right to trimming our trees (even though I have been known to listen to Christmas music in October) – skipping right over the thanks. I was thrilled when I saw three homemade wooden Thanksgiving decorations in someone’s yard the other day. You don’t see much of that. Does placing a turkey in a window or a pair of pilgrims on the sidewalk mean the owner is thankful? I don’t know, but I do know he or she is at least thinking about it.

And we do need to think about it. We are not naturally a thankful, grateful people. In the Bible we are told to give thanks, commanded to give thanks: Psalm 136:1  ^“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever.” Psalm 107:15 “Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind…”                                   1 Thessalonians 5:18 “give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.” If we were innately thankful, we wouldn’t have to be ordered to be so. We wouldn’t have to learn it.

When I was little, if I wanted something or something was given to me, my parents would remind me, “Now, what are the magic words?” They wanted me to say “please” and “thank you” and they wanted me to be thankful. I don’t suppose they thought that making me say those words would automatically make me thankful, but the words' repeated use certainly made me think about it. And besides, use of those polite words helps a person function in polite society (and if you are saying, “”What’s that?” maybe the fact that we don’t insist our children use those “magic words” anymore might be one of the reasons).

A popular November activity on the social media outlet, Facebook, has several of my acquaintances daily posting something for which they are thankful. Family, friends, food, pets, home, church and God are all mentioned. All good things, all blessings and they should never be glossed-over or counted as so “everyday” that they are not worth mentioning. But, as part of the “thinking” about thanks (the word “thank” has its root origins in the word “think”) I love it when people spend some time to ponder “all God’s wonderful deeds for mankind” (see Psalm 107:15 once again). This year my daughter is going through the alphabet, coming up with a blessing for each letter. You could take each letter and praise God for someone you know whose name starts with a,b,c…and so on. Another idea is to pick a color and give thanks for several things God made in that hue (red: apples, leaves, burning bushes in the fall, cherries, strawberries, roses, your friend’s hair, rubies). You get the idea. If we spend enough time thinking we won’t have any trouble thanking. (If you think you’ve thanked Him for just about everything you can think of, what if everything you have was taken away? Could you think of more then?)

God is so creative, so generous, so kind, so loving, His character so rich and full that we will run out of days to thank Him long before we run out of reasons to thank Him.

“To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble,
but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.” --Johannes A. Gaertner