Quiet Thanksgiving

The Lord has held me quiet lately.  And there is a grumbling within me.  A storm in the making.  The lightning is flashing on my failings and the thunder is crashing in on my expectations. The clouds are forming into a nearly visible shape and the wind is blowing through this stubborn stance of disobedience I’ve held firmly.  And I know. It’s time.  Time to do the only thing I can do. Let go. Exhale hard and let the tension fall to the ground.  And hope anything of me falls right with it. 

Bring on the rain, Lord. Let’s wash this vessel out.

It’s the month of Thanksgiving.  The month we focus on giving thanks. 

This November, I am choosing to quiet the noise around me so I can focus on the gifts that surround me. I am choosing to give my thanks to Him alone, to count His countless gifts, to nestle in quiet with the Giver, to take notice of gifts I may have missed, the ones I have been enfolded in all along. I am quieting what I can to hear Who I must and see what I already have.   

And, I will make my pleas that this giving thanks becomes a daily habit that leads me straight to joy, uncontainable joy.

 

I'm taking this month to form a habit of thanksgiving in the quiet, real-life places.  No Facebook. No meaningless cyberspace browsing.  Some occasional blogging, maybe.  Some necessary homeschool research, assuredly.  But no more aimless wandering with this machine.  It's a call to hush the virtual world and take hold of the real world.  A chance to embrace the story He's giving me instead of the story the world wants me to tell. The story I want to tell.

 

Thank you friends.  For grace. For you, your hearts ablaze with God-love. I am thankful for each of you.  And if any of you want to stop by for coffee in my messy, real world... well, I would certainly count it a true gift, a simple pleasure.  Call me, girl.

"Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.

For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.

Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker."

 

(Psalm 95:1-6)