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Dear Saint Mark Family,
I pray you are doing well and had a joy-filled Thanksgiving.
Although I did not grow up with the tradition of a Thanksgiving holiday, I have come to appreciate this day more and more. While we tend to celebrate the day gathered with family and friends around a meal, there is a grounding reality that stirs within us about the importance of giving thanks.
If we pause long enough, we will be aware of the abundance of blessings in our lives, no matter what we are going through or have encountered. Life, the gift of being alive, is a reason to give thanks. The ability to see, to hear, to feel, to taste, or to smell is a reason to give thanks. Beyond these, which we so often take for granted, there are all the others blessings God has poured out upon us and in our lives, for which we should give thanks. Blessings we cannot number or count.
The psalmists understood the importance of giving thanks, penning words of gratitude for what God has done. One of my favorite psalms of thanksgiving is Psalm 103. Hear the words of the writer:
Praise the Lord, my soul, all my inmost bring, praise God’s holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not God’s benefits who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things (1-5a)
The writers recognizes and acknowledges God’s goodness and love towards him, and as such writes a poem of thanksgiving for all God had done for him.
What poem would you write today in thanks to God? Where do you see God’s goodness and love over the span of your life? What are the benefits you can acknowledge as God-given?
I invite you to take a moment wherever you are as you read this note, and think of 2 things, for which you can give God thanks. Now that you have thanked the Lord for them as you go through the remainder of the day and before you go to sleep tonight.
Give thanks to God, for the Lord is good, and God’s love. endures forever.
Give thanks.
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