It’s all about giving thanks!
Happily I never tire when discussing “Giving Thanks” … this is one of my favorite topics. Giving thanks assumes there is something about which to give thanks, right?
But can you…
Give thanks when you are upset or stressed?
Give thanks when you are under financial strain?
Give thanks when the kids are misbehaving and everything goes wrong?
Ah…and that is the crux of the issue, while we know we can’t have everything going our way or extremely well 100% of the time, we may not realize that the reason we are upset many times is because of this very fact. Life happens. Life happens when we try to homeschool. Life happens when we plan a vacation. Life happens on the way to the grocery store. Life happens when the economy tanks.
So, if we realize “life” is going to happen we should be prepared for it and give thanks anyway. That is a very hard lesson I’ve learned the last several years. I’ve learned that no matter how much you plan for or save for the inevitable, in our case a very severe recession, you just can’t plan enough. Life happens! Both my husband and I are self-employed. Actually, we would have it no other way. My husband builds new construction homes, remodels, and has a home-inspection business, so you can imagine how it effected our lives. The recent economic downturn hurt the housing market severely.
So we give thanks, right? Wrong.
It wasn’t until much later when after countless hours of prayer I remembered how beneficial giving thanks was in the face of hardship. Giving thanks when we didn’t understand where the next job would come from, giving thanks as we watched our retirement fund dwindle. We continued to give thanks.
And, our children watched us. I found a picture among my presentation slides folder and made it larger and wrote the words “Give thanks to the Lord everyday” and hung it up where we could all see it. And, we did. WE gave thanks even if we didn’t want to give thanks. It helped us tremendously and little by little there was more, and more things in which to give thanks! [If you want a larger size of the picture below to print out it is here.]
I’m working on a talk for church, the topic is “Prayer: Humility before God.” I believe that giving thanks is showing the Lord that we are humble before Him and we realize He knows our plight and understands! Humility is a virtue, and we acknowledge that God is the author of all that is good! He knows what we are going through and understands. We also know that the Lord of the universe has the ability to answer our prayers or to say, “not yet,” and accepting that truth takes every ounce of our being. That is true humility…and can we continue to thank Him through that time? With His strength we can (the strength that surpasses all understanding!) Philippians 4:7
Please share ways you praise the Lord even when things are tough!
Are you a member of our email group? IF so you will receive a copy of Hal and Melanie Youngs audio – “Gather Together, Build Unity Not Stress” Want your copy and you don’t subscribe yet? Go here to sign up – we email you with show updates and amazing gifts like this bonus audio.
