Thankful Thursday ✽ Happy Thanksgiving

It's been a wonderful day. Not without it's difficult moments, for it's still just a day on earth, of course. Some sickness, some bumps and bruises, broken washers and mistakes have all been included in our Thanksgiving. But the beauty of Thanksgiving isn't that it's a day when everything goes completely right, and we say, oh how wonderful is a break from our daily life filled with woe. No, the beauty of Thanksgiving is that no matter what happens, it's existence reminds us to give thanks for what God has blessed us with, no matter what may seem to go wrong, or how rough things may be. And it gives us a wonderful excuse -or reminder, whichever you want to consider it- to spend time with those we love <3.

In between reading Thanksgiving story read-alouds, baking, and eating goodies together with my family today, I'm trying to take time to dwell on the grace and mercy of the Lord in all the blessings he has given me this past year. This year... it didn't go like we expected. It especially didn't go as we would have hoped going into it. We still don't understand why some of the things we went through had to happen. But even these circumstances have been used for good and have brought hope with them. And through this trying year, the Lord has upheld us. I'm going to sit down to a table tonight around which will be ten of the people I love most in the world, and we'll have plenty of good food with which to nourish our bodies, and we'll have memories to look back on, and be making new memories together, as well. We'll clean up this big mess all this cooking creates, and then we'll gather in the living room to decorate our Christmas tree, with ornaments that directly point to Jesus, and we'll discuss their meaning.

I've also tried to make some time to text each of the people outside my family I care about most today, because I believe this day is the perfect time to remind people that we are thankful for them, as well. It's funny that I've often said it's a bit lonelier here then it was last time we lived here.. which is true, I don't have as many local friends. But as I was texting the people that I most especially wanted to know I was thinking of them; family, best friends, people who have gone out of their way to bless me this past year; I was reminded again of how blessed I have been with wonderful, encouraging, beautifully caring friends, even if they aren't very close travel-wise. And those were just the people I could text! There are some people at the churches I volunteer at and, yes, even our church that I still feel rather new to, that deserve thanks for the ways they have blessed us this past year as well, if I had only had their number. I've been immensely blessed with the people God has put in my life! And I am also thankful for you blog readers. Some of you are becoming friends to me as well, and thank you for caring about me and what is going on in my life!

Above all I am thankful for my Father in Heaven, His love for me, His patience with my slow-to-learn heart, and His rest for the weary spirit. And I'm thankful for a Savior who walks alongside us with such marvelous love, that He would give Himself over to death, that we need not live without Him.

"Come thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above
I'll praise the mount I'm fixed upon it
Mount of thy redeeming love

Here I raise my Ebenezer
Hither by thy help I come
And I hope by thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wondering from the fold of God
He, to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee
Prone to wander Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above."

"I  will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call on the name of the LORD." -Psalm 116:17