In the United States, we have a holiday called Thanksgiving Day.  It is celebrated the fourth Thursday of November.  The celebration mainly consists of a meal featuring turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberries, etc.  Different families have different varieties of food for the meal.  Football is often part of the festivities, as is a parade(everybody loves a parade).  It is a day, in theory, to be thankful for the things we have.  It is also the day before Black Friday, a commercial holiday we celebrate by purchasing more things we can be thankful for next Thanksgiving, but that’s a topic for another time.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday because it’s about being thankful.  But it isn’t just about being thankful for the things you have, or at least not to me.  It’s about so much more.  It’s about being thankful for the people in your life.  More broadly stated, it’s about being thankful for all that you have and are.  If you are a parent, be thankful.  If you have parents, be thankful.  If you have a job that pays your bills, be thankful.  If you have friends that you call or text to wish a Happy Thanksgiving, be thankful.  If you accepted God’s greatest gift(salvation), be thankful.  And although I could make a very long list here, I won’t.  Each person reading this will have a different set of things to be thankful for, so I’ll let you do the list creation part.

That being said, Thanksgiving is just one day out of 365(or 366, as is the case this year).  What about the other 364(or 365)?  Are we not thankful on all of those days?  Are we JUST thankful on that one day?  I hope not.  But with the hectic lives that so many of us live, it can get to that extreme, or close to it.  It is so easy to receive God’s blessings, day after day, week and week, month after month, year after year, etc. and not express our thanks.

Things

There’s nothing wrong with things.  They are neither good nor bad, in and of themselves.  But if God is the provider of every good thing in our lives, and He is, then we need to be thankful for that . . . every day of our lives(Jam. 1:17).  This is true in part because he blesses us with things every day of our lives, but even if a day were to come and go with no blessings from God(personally I cannot fathom such a day), we should still be thankful for the blessings we received every day prior to that day.

It is true that we can put an undue importance on things, and at that point things can become an anchor in our lives, pulling us away from God.  But that is not the fault of the things; it is in error on our part in putting too great an emphasis on inanimate objects. 

People

The people in our lives can be a blessing, but they can also be a curse.  Some people bring us closer to God; some people draw us farther away from God.  Or at least different people attempt to have divergent effects upon us.  In the end, it is up to each of us to determine what effect, if any, another person will have on our lives.  That is our decision and only our decision.

Conclusion

Let’s be thankful . . . for the people in our lives . . . for the things in our lives . . . and most importantly, let us be thankful for God in our lives.  And let’s also remember that all the good things in our lives, I mean literally every last good thing in our lives, comes from God.  How could we not be thankful every single day of our lives.  And if you don’t think you have much of anything to be thankful for . . . think again.  You are probably taking things or people for granted.  Or maybe you just aren’t allowing yourself to be the recipient of some blessings.  Quite often, there are blessings to be had, but we forego them, for whatever reason.  That is not God’s fault; it is our fault for not taking full advantage of the blessings He is offering to us.  Let’s not ignore God’s blessings in our lives; let’s not ignore all the blessings God wants us to have in our lives.  He loves you so much . . . let Him.