A Spirit of Thankfulness

Sunday night, I'll be really honest here...

I was tired.
I was frustrated.
I was distracted.
I was homesick.
I felt alone.

And there was nothing in that moment that I could bring myself to look forward to. (To those of you who are about to email me and ask me if I'm okay, I'm fine. Keep reading.)

If we're being honest, this is part of being fully human, of fully feeling. Some days, that's what it was going to look like.

I went to our middle school get together/youth group. And you know what? I'm going to be even more honest...On that day, and in that moment, I went because right now I'm being paid by the church to be there. That's it though. There wasn't really any other reason. I didn't want to be there, for all of the above reasons, and I felt like I was the last person in the world who needed to be teaching these girls about the joy of Christ because at that moment...

I didn't feel it.

When I arrived early for our leader's meeting, Pastor Mark said we were going to be reviewing Romans 1:21-32. Paul is writing about a group of people who lived a couple thousand years ago and he says this, "[they were] filled with unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworty, unloving, unmerciful..."

Sounds a little familiar doesn't it?

Read the newspaper...murder, gossip, slander, malice.
Think about what you call politicians...arrogant, deceitful, greedy.
Think about what every American generation says about the one coming up behind them...they don't obey their parents, they're insolent, they think the world revolves around them.
Think about the people who hurt you the most in life...I can't trust them. They didn't love me well. They wouldn't forgive me.

Scripture, it would seem, may be more relevant than we ever tend to remember. 2,000 years later...and we're still doing the same things.

But if we back up just a little bit, Paul begins with this, "...that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them..."

He made it evident to us through creation. Look around. Look at the person next to you. That is how God made Himself known to us.

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."

Paul goes onto say, "For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Pastor Mark said, "This may sound crazy...but I really think that the beginning of seeing a difference in this world is going to have to start with thankfulness."

And I thought not of every word that had hurt me in the past 24 hours, but of the people who spoke those words and how grateful I was to have them in my life. I thought not of every "thing" that had to be done in the coming week, but of the opportunities that were before me to simply live a productive life and have a reason to get out of bed. I thought not of what was so far away, but what was right in front of me.

That night I looked at all my girls and I said, "What do you have in this life that you deserve?" They all looked around at each other and then stared at the floor for a long time. Finally one of them said, "Nothing. I don't deserve any of it."

"So every single thing that is yours, every object, every person, every event...there's reason to be thankful for it?"

"Yeah...because somebody else out there doesn't have it. And for some reason I do."

In some ways, that's the definition of grace. But it's more than that. It's going beyond the "I don't deserve it." It's acknowledging that and then continuing to move forward into, "But for the grace of God I do, simply because He promised that ALL things would work together for His glory and for my good. Everything I've done that makes me undeserving will be used by Him, that He will be glorified through my life."

And that's grace. And whether I feel it or not, it's always there.

And for that, I will spend a lot more of my day being thankful.