LIBERATED BY THANKSGIVING - be free to be thankful this week. 

“Try to live one entire day in utter thanksgiving.  Balance every complaint with ten gratitudes, every criticism with ten compliments.” - Richard Foster

To be thankful is to experience a kind of freedom, for being thankful for what you already have means your heart is not set on what you do not have.  It is a freedom from the rush of consumerism.  It is freedom from the mad cycle of grumbling and complaining about how everything could be, whereas you haven’t taken fully into account how good things really are.  The Apostle Paul once said that everything is good and not to be rejected if it can be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4).  The practice of thanksgiving can turn everything into a gift that we are given from God.  

In this light, all the gifts we receive are clues to a greater love that surrounds us.  From the smallest thanks of the bliss of a steaming cup tea on a cold autumn day to being surround by friends and family on a holiday, we receive these things as given to us from God himself.  Then everything, day in and day out, becomes an opportunity for joy.  Then all that we have becomes an opportunity for worship of God rather than the slavery of greed or discontentment.

Complaining is the opposite of thanksgiving.  It is a bitterness of spirit, a slavery of the heart, a endless cold stream of grumbling that we can sadistically dive into day in and day out.  It offers no peaceful balm for the soul, no way of enjoyment for what is before us.  It robs the world of its transcendence, and takes what we have as all there is, which is never enough. 

Thanksgiving also frees us from our current cultural obsession with nostalgia.  Nostalgia is a lie we perpetuate by looking back with rose colored glasses and pretend how perfect yesterday was, making our current reality dimmed and unwanted.  “This is the day that the LORD has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).  There is a new song of praise we can sing today (Psalm 98:1); nostalgia sings old songs of praise and robs us of the joys of today. Yesterday was a gift, but God has given us today.  Be thankful; we must not miss what is before us.  Seen in this way, perhaps thanksgiving is a battleground of cultural resistance.  Let us fight the good fight. 

Thanksgiving launches us into seeing our place and our days as God’s place and God’s days, transforming them into something sacred and holy.  Poor or rich alike, thanksgiving is available to us through faith. 

It is a great equalizer of sorts. 

A wealthy family enjoying the most luxurious of meals in peace can could be a few houses down from a much poorer family with only meager rations, yet equal thanks can be given before God.  This is because if we all recognize that ultimately what we have is given to us by God - what we have we received.  It doesn’t belong to us.  Whether much or little, we become free to cut our eyes off from the jealousy of what we think we may be missing, or become free to not set our hearts on the abundance we may have. 

Finally, to live in thanksgiving is to do so carefully.  It requires you to pay attention, to cast off distraction, and be present where you are with what surrounds you.  It provides such freedom to be thankful for the most simple of things that regularly surround us.  How else could the psalmist see the trees and the rivers clap their hands in worship, and the hills - how mundane and ordinary is a hill of dirt! - sing for joy (Psalm 98:7-8)?  What can transform leaves to clapping, a hill of dirt into a joyful song?  “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1).  What a splendid thing to see the trees we see everyday to be transformed into a crowd of clapping hands!  To see the hills that offer us nothing but a distant sight on our driving commute suddenly transformed into a song of joy to Jesus himself!  These require no box or wrapping or bow, these require no money to be spent. Yet they offer such joy - if we receive their sight with thanksgiving.

Let us enter this week of thanksgiving with such freedom.  And who knows, maybe even your plate of food will clap its hands in a song of joy - if received with thanksgiving.