Practicing Thankfulness

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I know that sometimes schedules require a little flexibility and that work, travel, or gatherings with different sides of the family can impact the day that you actually get to gather around a table with family to celebrate any given holiday. Depending on when you’re seeing this article and when your family is able to gather for the holiday, you may have already celebrated Thanksgiving or you might still be preparing to gather together in the future.

No matter how your family get-together looks this year, I hope that everybody makes sure to take some time to be thankful for the goodness in your life. I know that there will be some hard or bad things mixed in with the good things, but I want to encourage you not to let that take away from spending some time being grateful. I’ve been dealing with some hard medical news that a loved one recently received. For my family, there are some issues and circumstances that are currently impacting each of the families of my four adult children. Things they wish they weren’t dealing with.

And I’m specifically mentioning this because it would be easy to read my article on thankfulness and assume that life is just perfect for the Seaborn family and that’s why I can talk about the importance of gratitude. Well, life isn’t perfect for us, but I’m still here talking about gratitude. And that’s because even though there is hard stuff we’re facing, there is also a lot of really great stuff that we can lose sight of if we only focus on the painful things.

We can be thankful for the four adult children who love each other and love their own kids and all of their nieces and nephews. (That doesn’t mean we always get along or agree on things, by the way!) And we’re dealing with some health issues, but nothing that requires immediate surgery or aggressive treatments. We have a warm place to gather and enough food to go around. I could go on and on, because once I start thinking about my list of what I’m thankful for, things just keep coming to mind. I was on a flight a while ago that touched down with the back wheels and then took off again before circling to re-land. I don’t know what was going on there, but I’m thankful it wasn’t something more serious and that we landed safely on the second try.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? There is just so much to be thankful for! Even some of the things that aren’t great still may have some aspects to them that we can celebrate. And I want to encourage everybody reading this to take some time to create a mental checklist of some of the things that you have to be thankful for. I would also invite you to have some version of this conversation at your Thanksgiving family gathering. I know that we will. Then, we will spend some time thanking God for all of the ways that He’s provided for our family this year—even in the face of some things that are hard!