In the season of thanksgiving I have found it is easy to list the things we are all thankful for...family, friends, faith, good health, our homes, and so on. Yet, I have been looking deeper and trying to see the little things that fill my heart with full thanksgiving. The list of family and friends and so on is true to my heart too...I am so very thankful for these things. But what about these people and these heart fluttering things is it that makes me feel a deep gratitude to the Creator who has blessed me with such at this time in my life?
I have started my days looking for what makes my family and my friends and my home and my faith so special to me. For me to have full thanksgiving, I have to see past the obvious and not take these things as if they are mine to keep always. And then I read these words this morning..."We are merely moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing" This is found in Psalms and as I read the words over and over I realized what it is that makes me so thankful for all the things listed above. Family, friends, faith, health...all these things are not the ordinary. For if you look long into our world, many are without these things that come so naturally for us to be thankful for. They are extraordinary things that God has blessed me with, but the biggest blessing of all is the time He has given me to enjoy and be with such things.
As a follower of Jesus, we essentially have all the time in the world...ever-lasting life and yet so often...I am out of time? In trying to rush around to accomplish what I have made important to accomplish, I run out of time to be with the very basic and yet very extraordinary things in my life. I look back at my last year and see where I let time slip through my fingers and rushed to get something that at the end of the day, does not really fill my heart the way the first blessings in my life do. How often do we say..."if I had more hours in a day"? We have lots of hours, awake hours even, yet we still run out of time.
This past summer I abruptly put a hault to many things outside of my immediate commitments...my faith, my family, my home. In the fast paced days I was living, my time was leading to nothing really. A moving shadow in a fast paced world that demands our time. I wanted to make space for the time it took to build mountains amongst my family and create bridges with friends and live by faith instead of simply saying it. Time needed to show me what my shadow was doing while nobody was looking. While rushing through my hours of a day, I came up with nothing at the end of them.
Then something beautiful happened... our Creator and Savior blessed me with time. The kind of time where you sit and squeeze your baby's cheeks and look deep into your son's eyes as he tells you the same story for the 20th time and the ability to really see the face of your husband who has worked a long hard day and feel the goose-bumps you get only when you've tucked everyone in at the end of the day and can truly say to yourself...today was a good day, a really good day. Why? Because I had time...time with and for and amongst all those everyday extraordinary gifts that bring the meaning of thanksgiving to a whole new degree when you've really given them time. Shadows of time that let you see the small, simple, and rare gifts of each day. Story reading, heads around a table, bath full of bubbles, and all piled on a couch together. Because when my days of rushing come to an end, I hope that my heart will still be able to say....thank you. Thank you for eyes to really see the slow and simple. Thank you for ears to hear the quiet and distant noises of my day. Thank you for hands to hold and be free to what stands in front of me...right now, at this moment. Today I have time for my family, my friends, my faith, my home... and today I write it across my heart. I am ever so grateful for not only ever-lasting life time, but the very exact minutes happening right now. For in time, I have found a deeper thanks. And thanksgiving lives on in a whole new way.
