30+ Days of Giving Thanks, Day 61: The Season Finale

I made it to the finish line! I set out on November 1 to mention one thing each day for which I am thankful. Once into the assignment, I realized that I would need more than 30 days to adequately (by my estimation) express thanks for the various blessings in my life. So I decided to extend the period of thanksgiving to the end of 2011, and today, I am gratified to see that I have met my goal (this one, at least!) of having something to be thankful for every day for the rest of the year.

So today, I am thankful for thankfulness. No, that’s not “double-speak” or an attempt at cleverness. I am thankful for the paradigm shift I have experienced over the past two months—going to some effort every day to think about, and express gratitude to God for, at least one way in which God has and is blessing me. A skeptic, agnostic or atheist might make a case, in reading my various posts, that God has had little if anything to do with most of the things I have written about. What does God care about a library, or system of libraries? Is He responsible for that? And so on. To that hypothetical person (who probably isn’t reading my posts anyway!) I answer: I choose to acknowledge God as the Sovereign Authority, under Whom all things, whether sacred and spiritual or secular and natural, mysterious and mundane alike, exist and flourish. Consider how the British speak of “the Queen’s this” or “the Queen’s that” when the Queen hardly has had any direct influence over everything in British society. Nevertheless, all things British exist under the sovereignty of the crowned monarch.

As I was saying, I am thankful for how being thankful for everything in my life, or at least, learning to be thankful for everything, has helped me to see more clearly how God has blessed me—and how He has blessed me over the long-term, the entire course of my life, as well as the short-term, the immediate needs in my life. It has been a distinctly transformative experience for me to deliberately, and with thought and occasionally with mighty effort, identify things, people, events, and systems in my life that bear witness to the Sovereignty of God and His Divine Providence acting in my behalf to provide for me physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, socially and spiritually to constantly nurture me and nudge me toward maturity—toward the Image of Christ to which God has intended for me to be conformed.

Thank You, Heavenly Father, for this lesson in thankfulness. I will try not to forget what I have learned under Your instruction, but rather, to continue to practice being thankful in all things.