Happy Thanksgiving

The other day I saw a church sign that read:

Thanksgiving is good, but thanks living is better

Having a heart of thanksgiving everyday, what a novel idea!

But sometimes it is hard to have a grateful heart when you are going through a difficulty. My Pastor often reminds us to look at what we have and where we live and compare it to places that don't have any of these essential items: We have a Walgreens drugstore at every major intersection to buy our medications. There are several choices of grocery stores within reach that have aisles upon aisles of food at our disposal. We have running water,flushing toilets,bathtubs and showers with clean water. In some countries this would be called living in luxury.

I often reflect back to the hymn It Is Well With My Soul
penned by Horatio Sprafford back in the 1800's. He wrote this hymn after losing his daughters in an accident out on the ocean. Not only did he have to endure this but he had lost much of the property he owned in the Chicago Fire a short time before this. Yet he was able to say in the worst of times, "It is well with my soul."

We all know that our faith grows the most through our circumstances, and we sometimes
probably even ask ourselves, "Why can't my faith just grow during the good things in life?"

Here's one good answer,which comes from the book Power in Praise:

Why can't our faith grow in pleasant, easy circumstances? It can, and as we come to trust and rely more and more on God's promises, it does. But the purifying, the testing of our faith, comes through circumstances that are a challenge to our determination to believe, trust, and rely on God's word, in spite of what our senses tells us. For too long we've trusted our senses, our emotions, and our intellect to dictate our beliefs. We must break that habit in order to exercise faith.

Remember, faith means a deliberate determination to believe something we can't see or feel the evidence of.

So if God is telling us He's working everything out for our good, and we see everything go wrong, our faith grows when we stand on God's word and thank Him for everything that happens.

I guess this would be called Thankful Living. May we all find something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving!