THANKSGIVING-2018

 “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”

Dalai Lama said: When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect towards others.

Thanksgiving day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow. (Edward Sandford Martin).

In 1 Thes.5:18 Paul says: Give thanks to God in all circumstances. To find God in ordinary situations is not easy for human beings, especially when one is going through tough times. People generally think that God is not with them when difficulties hit them. Only when people see light at the end of the tunnel they realize there was God with them when they were walking through the dark tunnel. So we need to thank God in every circumstance. Think of the Pilgrims that first Thanksgiving. Half their number dead, men without a country, but still there was thanksgiving to God. Their gratitude was not for something but in something. It was that same sense of gratitude that led Abraham Lincoln to formally establish the first Thanksgiving Day in the midst of national civil war, when the butcher’s list of casualties seemed to have no end and the very nation struggled for survival.

Perhaps in our own life, right now we are in the midst of intense hardship. We are experiencing our own personal Great Depression. Why should we be thankful this day? Our forefathers were not so much thankful for something as they were thankful in something. In bounty or in want, they were thankful. In feast or in famine they were thankful. In joy or in misery they were thankful. There is a big difference between being thankful for things and being thankful in all things.

During a harvest festival in India, an old widow arrived at her church with an extraordinarily large offering of rice - far more than the poor woman could be expected to afford. The itinerant pastor of the church did not know the widow well. But he did know that she was very poor and so he asked her if she were making the offering in gratitude for some unusual blessing. "Yes," replied the woman. "My son was sick and I promised a large gift to God if he got well." "And your son has recovered?" asked the pastor. The widow paused. "No," she said. "He died last week. But I know that he is in God's care; for that I am especially thankful."

A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues. Cicero.

Along with being thankful to God it is also important to be thankful to many others we take for granted every day; our parents who brought us up and educated us and took God’s place when we were young, siblings who supported us encouraged us and loved us, our neighbors who had influenced us in many ways, our teachers, and the list goes on. So, a day like this would remind us of our responsibilities towards them.

Someone suggested why we should be thankful:

1.We must learn to be thankful or we become bitter.
2. We must learn to be thankful or we will become discouraged.
3. We must learn to be thankful or we will grow arrogant and self-satisfied.

We know a lot of people in our life who after losing one of their loved ones don’t show respect for God or come to Church, thinking God did that on purpose to punish them for something….and they remain bitter. I wish they read the book of Job and take some inspiration from there.

This is a day we count our blessings. For many of us, our focus will be on our material blessings. Our warm house, the comfortable car, the stylish clothes, a table bountifully spread. And yet, in the long run of things, these are the least important of all our blessings. The first thing to be thankful for is our faith we are given to believe in a loving God, whom we can trust in any challenging situation. Jesus warned the people who followed him for material things. He said: “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. These mundane blessings are generally trivial and transitory.

Be thankful for what you enjoy and the rest of the world can only dream: life, liberty, and a chance to pursue happiness. Let’s develop an attitude of gratitude in all circumstances which will help us to develop a positive outlook on life and bring joy to dwell in our hearts.