It’s time for Thanksgiving. You probably wonder where I’ve been for the past couple of months. You’re thinking we’ve been there and done that for this past holiday season.
“You’re either a little behind or very, very early,” you say.
Not quite. You see, it’s always time for Thanksgiving.
I was reminded of this at a memorial service for my aunt over the weekend. Technically it wasn’t a memorial service, since she didn’t want one, but a church service dedicated to her memory. The theme of the sermon was how to maintain a spiritual life in today’s hectic world.
Now, I’m not Christian and, therefore, don’t often go to church. But one of the ways mentioned to counteract the chaos of modern life was to “rejoice and pray.”
The “rejoice” part is what caught my ear.
Rejoicing in what you have is like giving thanks, only better. It’s appreciation with an extra dose of happiness thrown in.
In a society where at every turn we’re expected and required to do more, produce more, buy more, and just have more, more, more, it’s easy to get into the mode of thinking that “I need more.” The logical conclusion from that line of reasoning is, “What I have is not enough.”
This means that the fact that we have food to eat and water to drink is not enough. Having a home to shelter us from the rain, wind and cold is not enough. Having a bed to sleep in is not enough. Having legs and feet, or a car or a bus, to get us where we need to go is not enough. Our relationships with our family members, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, friends, co-workers are not enough. Our playthings are not enough. Whatever relationship we may have with the unseen forces of the universe is not enough.
“We need more.”
Thoughts are things, and what we dwell on tends to come true. If we dwell on lack, then lack is what we get.
Conversely, if we think abundance – if we notice and give thanks for how much we do have, and go forward with that perspective – then abundance is what we get.
It doesn’t mean we’ll get rich overnight. It doesn’t mean everything will always be just the way we want it. As the man giving the sermon pointed out, sometimes we don’t feel much like giving thanks. We can’t feel good all the time.
But even in these times, there’s something to be grateful for. There are very few instances in which things could not be worse than they are.
This doesn’t mean we should give up trying for the things, or circumstances, we want. But doing it with the idea that we’re not whole human beings without them is one thing; doing it with the knowledge that most likely we’ll be OK either way is another.
Because of the way we’ve been trained, we could be tempted to rejoice and give thanks just to see what we can get out of it, to sit back and wait for the goodies to start rolling in. But there’s another carrot we can use to motivate ourselves to appreciate what we have. It’s equally selfish, but in a good way – much more pure, direct and immediate.
It makes us feel better.
What more reason do we need? If we feel at least OK, it’s a great starting place. If we feel good, anything else is just so much gravy.
Bill Sheets is editor of the Edmonds Enterprise.
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