THANKFUL

Celebrating Thanksgiving as a holiday and giving thanks are as different as night and day.  The holiday (it seems) has become a bump on the way to Christmas.  Black Friday and Cyber Monday as well as football games headline the day.  There is food and there are family gatherings that we work in.

Thanksgiving as a holiday for our family always meant...FAMILY!  It also meant travel.  Before kids, with kids and after kids we traveled.  One car, van, two cars and even four to five cars from our family would show up at Granny's (Phyllis' mom) and soon aunts and uncles, neices and nephews were close behind.  It got loud, it got crowded and you had better be ready to be flexible and watch plans change in seconds (I was never ready).  Today, although locations change and there are some who are not with us anymore and others just from time to time...we get together.  Yeah, we travel...at least for the time being.  Hopefully, one day we will live closer.

Giving of thanks is an entirely different story.  Giving thanks takes a grateful heart.  It causes us to slow down.  It makes us look back, look within and LOOK UP!  I am grateful today.  I am grateful that a Sovereign God willed that I be born in a family that loves God.  In my family the house of God, the Word of God and the Son of God had prominence.  The church house was our second home.  The Word of God was read daily and the Son of God was King in our home.  Thank you Mom and Dad for loving us so much that you presented Christ to us.

I am thankful for a wife that walks with God and loves God more than she loves me which enables her to love me like God wants her too.  For 38 years she has served at my side as a fellow servant of the Lord Jesus.  She has moved when God said, gone where God has sent and loved the people He has sent us to.

John writes, "I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth (3 John 1:4). I know what he means.  I am thankful for 3 daughters and 2 sons-in-law that are walking with God.  God has blessed us with 4 grandchildren that are being nurtured to love God.

Someone ask me the other day how I was doing.  I said, "Better than I deserve."  That's an understatement. 
Give thanks this year.  Give thanks from a grateful heart.  I give thanks for what He had done for me.  I was dead in sin and He made me alive.  I was lost and He found me.  I was hopeless and He gave me Hope.  He caused me to be born again to a living hope.  Thank you Lord Jesus.