Today is one of my favorite days of the entire year. It’s our “family Thanksgiving dinner” at our church. I missed last year because our toddler was sick and I had to stay home with her but the rest of my family still had a really good time. I’m glad to have made it this year! It’s so fun to be with family and some of my favorite people in the world are under the roof of that little church on Mustang Road. There’s really no better dinner than one cooked up by a bunch of Southern Baptist women, either (as long as those women aren’t me – because I can’t cook very good, haha) but there’s something so lovely and dear about being in community with your brothers and sisters. I didn’t eat any of the food this year (and I’m sorry to say that because wowzers those women can cook) but I’m taking some medicine for a few more weeks that makes me nauseated and I chose to pass up on eating …. but I was fed just the same; in worship, prayer, hearing testimony and I got to visit with some incredible friends of mine, and one in particular who always warms my heart. The holidays are particularly hard for me and today was so good for my heart. I love seeing my “family” together. I love doing life in community.

Our Father is good. Faithful. Generous.

Abundantly so.

I came home and started thinking about how I hadn’t been doing this “30 Days Of Thanksgiving” like a lot of my friends had been doing. If you don’t know what that it is, it’s where you either journal, or put on Facebook (because if you don’t put it on Facebook it’s not official, right?) something that you’re thankful for everyday. I was so upset with myself. I thought wow, I sure have enough time to read funny memes or watch baby goat and llama videos, but I can’t find a few minutes to list things I’m thankful for. I was really feeling bad about myself, y’all! I kept thinking, how shallow am I?

Then I started to say some negative things to myself in my head and I started asking the Lord to take my thoughts captive. (2 Corinthians 10:5)

I paused for a moment to pray and when I raised my eyes I felt a weight up off my shoulders. How often do we just stop to ask, “Is this something that you’re upset about or that I’ve made myself upset about, Father?”

Then I began to question, was it culture or conviction?

It is the very culture in which I live that has affected my think process here. I’ve allowed myself to think I need to make this 30 days of being thankful because it’s November and it’s Thanksgiving month and so that’s the “thing” to do. That’s just something in our culture that people do but I don’t have to do it. Here’s the thing, I think those lists are great to do and I think that we should make lists like that. We should keep record of the things the Lord has done for us and that we are grateful for, it’s going to keep us coming back and reminding us of all the times He’s been faithful because we are too easily distracted and forget the 99 times we got our way but like to remember the one time we didn’t. I like to write down answered prayers in a notebook myself. But this is a different thing I’m talking about, specifically this 30 days of Thanksgiving. (Don’t get me wrong, DO IT!! Yes, do it. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it.)  The enemy is full of condemnation. He accuses. He accused me of not doing something that I couldn’t go back and do – since it’s almost Thanksgiving – and so I felt bad.

God put it on my heart to remind me what worship is about. It’s all about Him …. it’s all for Him. My Pastor reminds us periodically about coming back to our “first love”, meaning that first flame, the first love we had for Jesus and that’s what I thought about when the Lord was speaking to my heart tonight, staring up at the wooden cross at the altar. The cross. Calvary. Wow.

Calvary; we shouldn’t be living our lives from any other place outside of gratitude for Jesus. If not for every breath we breathe, if not for every single moment of faithfulness that God has proven to us, then for Calvary.

First and foremost……the work at Calvary. I should be living my life from a place of gratitude simply because I was going straight to hell and now I’m not. I should be living my life from a place of gratitude because Jesus took the hell from my sins into His body, paying the wages of my sin. Go ahead and make your lists of things you’re thankful for but don’t get so caught up with it that being thankful is just something to check off your lists, it shouldn’t just be something we do, it should be something we are. Yes we should list the things we are thankful for, but who we are should be thankful people, living from a place of gratitude for a risen Savior.

“But Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”

1 Corinthians 15:57

“Enter into His gates with Thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise: be thankful unto Him, and bless His name.”

Psalm 100:4