Happy Thanksgiving

As this season of harvest draws to a close and we take stock of all that the Lord has done and all that we have to be thankful for, we’re making the conscious choice to adopt gratitude—to focus not on the unknowns, the losses, the pain, or the twists of treachery and hardship. Instead, we are filling our minds with what is good, excellent, and praiseworthy, choosing to think upon such things.

I am thankful for faithfulness above all else—for a God who never leaves or forsakes, for His love that never fails or gives up, for His purpose that survives our faults and failures and redeems all, ever for the magnification of His goodness and glory. I am thankful that His persistent, larger plan can absorb all the shifts and shocks of our inconstancy, wavering, and weakness, so that we can say with Paul, “In everything, we give thanks!” And this is only because in everything He is faithful, He is able, and He is working—all things for the good.

And I am thankful for friends, brothers, sisters, and family who live out our Father’s faithfulness in a world where even truth and reality themselves are often bent and contorted to match the wandering desires and justifications of fearful, self-seeking sinners. But I am thankful for those who keep their word even to their own hurt, who believe in love even when it entails a “fight of faith.”

I am thankful to be part of a family of Jesus in which the powers of decay and disintegration—fear, hatred, suspicion, lies, cruelty, and death—keep being defeated, keep failing at their intended aim of peeling us away from each other and from our Lord. In a world and time filled with swift transition, when none on earth unmoved can stand, I am thankful for those who build their hopes on things eternal and cling to God’s unchanging hand.

For from that hand flows a life that keeps defying the odds and rising from the ashes—strength from weakness, joy from mourning, a garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness. Yes, I am thankful for all those who keep their troth, who prove across generations that love is worth the effort and that faith and trust are worth protecting at all costs.

My grateful soul shouts to the cynicism, the suspicion, the dejection, and the pain of a betrayal-filled world: “You lose!” And I clasp tightly the hands of the faithful, the self-giving, the persevering, the children of our conquering King. Hardships and troubles cannot change you, but they will reveal you. And I offer a great Thanksgiving for the gold of faithfulness, refined and proven in the fires of another year.

Happy Thanksgiving to you! Happy Thanksgiving for a harvest not of vegetables and fruit or meat alone, but of lives like trees planted by water, who never cease bearing fruit, even in the tribulations of a scorching summer heat. Happy Thanksgiving for the garden of God, for the tree of Life, for the bounty and blessings we share amid a world where love was supposed to grow cold.

Happy Thanksgiving—and the more we give thanks and express our gratitude to the Lord and to each other, the more we will receive of His gifts and the more we will have to be thankful for.

With love and gratitude from my family to yours,

Asi