The Lord is revealing to me that He can be a God of few words. How enticing is the difference between the Word and words… How the one just seems to encompass the others in silence, as if to say I am enough. I am all. I am.
God is explaining to me a gratitude that leaves me speechless…. A Thanksgiving meal that is more than a menu…. A gospel that is shared like breath…no rehearsal needed….. A knowing that He has a place set for me at His table, an assurance that sticks like warm, brown gravy to the ribs.
There is nothing that doesn’t dance to this music, and with this music, there isn’t a room that needs another thing.
Giving thanks is not a piling high of reasons, it’s more a letting go of the need to know those reasons in the first place. The more simply that I can experience gratitude, the lighter I will feel airborne on the flight of my life. Giving thanks is not at all the same thing as accepting the gift of gratitude. One plots the journey by tacking rote lists to the bulletin board of Heaven with sharp pins; the other breathes in the presence of God with eyes closed and arms open for what will simply come.
God is telling me to pack my suitcase lightly on my way to joy, to surround myself with less to clutter my sight. To intentionally place a precious, few objects in the curio cabinet of my soul. Whatever I need I can buy when I get there. To lessen my Thanksgiving inventory, to live more like a poem, with sparse words compressed and chosen as carefully as a child’s name…a poem where the meaning moves freely through the music of a verse without the limits imposed by unintentional words.
Thankfulness is not a spouting of reasons I should feel thankful, although that is certainly a start. But I have been doing that for over forty years now, and it’s time for some editing. Thankfulness is, for me, a letting go of words in order to walk in closer proximity to the Word, with nothing in my hands, with nothing but my empty hands, and a few precious things which I immediately drop at his feet with much relief.
I drop the need to cook the perfect turkey at His feet. I drop what is deep within the deep-fried deliciousness of that need, the need to feel connected to my own history. Instantly…no matter how the turkey turns out, I belong.
I drop the need to protect my children from any disappointments by granting them all their holiday wishes. I drop what is deep within the dollops of decorative confetti, the need to understand my own distinction…Instantly…no matter if the sweater fits or not, I am sanctified.
I drop the need to orchestrate the perfect moment, and the vacuum deep within the choreography of that dance which can only be filled by the Creator if I leave it as it was intended to be….empty.
I am finally grasping this season the difference between accomplishing a to-do list and the ingesting of the internal rhythm of a life well-lived in the light, how the one makes no time and space for joy, and how the other is teeming with it, so that joy gives life to everything and to everything else.
I am thankful.
-submitted by Kerri Snell
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