Though I’ll post this on Thanksgiving Thursday morning, I’m writing on our Wednesday morning drive from Mission Viejo to Sacramento. Gem and I have made this annual drive now twenty-five times.
For Thanksgiving, I’ll share a thought on the theme from Brennan Manning. (I posted these lines on their own last month):
“The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is gratefulness. Gratitude arises from the lived perception, evaluation, and acceptance of all of life as grace—as an undeserved and unearned gift from the Father’s hand. Such recognition is itself the work of grace, and acceptance of the gift is implicitly an acknowledgement of the Giver.” (Brennan Manning. Ruthless Trust. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000, p. 24-25.)
While I was in the Dominican Republic over the last two weeks, I had an interesting conversation with the director of YWAM for the Caribbean. He shared the insight he had heard that gratitude is an antidote for pride. How? Because gratitude is remembering in God’s presence that all that I am and all that I have is really a gift from God. My life is a gift of His creation and His redemption. Gratitude is acknowledging grace. It is a way of affirming that the best work in my life has been and is being done by Another hand.
For what are you grateful on this day? Here are some of my gratitudes:
- I thank God for countless evidences of His hand at work in and through me in the Dominican Republic. I’m especially grateful for my friends, Samuel & Kendra Luna, who are extending the ministry of The Leadership Institute there among missionaries and Dominican pastors.
- I am grateful for a good reunion with my bride and my boys, especially as we share this annual drive north together.
- I am thanking God for many new insights into unhurried time with God that I’ve learned while I was away that I will be writing up in December.
- I continue to thank God for places of soul healing I’m experiencing in a therapy journey over the last eighteen months.
- I’m grateful that in the midst of a down economy and some challenging debts, we are wealthier than we’ll ever imagine. (I see in my mind’s eye the very simple way of life of many of my Dominican brothers and sisters.)
- I keep thanking God for the privilege of leading leaders into His presence through many different kinds of retreat. Recent days of retreat have been especially encouraging in impact and fruit.
In the midst of your favorite Thanksgiving foods, how do you want to acknowledge your own debt to the generosity of God today?
