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Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I am so grateful to our Good God for each and every one of YOU!
Ephesians 5:20 AMPCAt all times and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.
“All creatures great and small…the Lord God made them all” (C. F. Alexander, All Things Bright and Beautiful, 19th century English hymn)
Everything I see (and can’t see) has been made by God. All is here with purpose, plan, and placement. Whether it was spoken into being at creation, formed from the dust, planted over and again since the first bloom, or borne as fruit from the seed of an idea in the mind of one of Adam’s descendants.
Thus, everything can be a chance or a choice for gratitude. To give thanks for this piece of creation as being given from our Good God. To see the grace wrapped in every opportunity and organism. To recognize the beauty in a speck and in the spectacular. To acknowledge the amazing in each particle and promise.
Clean running water. Breathing in and out. Curls on a grandbaby’s head. Food on a plate. Gas in a car. Beating hearts. Heated homes. Friends near and far. Technology for communication. Family by blood, whether it’s running in our veins or ran from Christ’s body. Minds to learn. Souls to receive. Living Words on a page. And the oh so much more beyond what I can name or see or understand – each a gift, each a grace.
All to be received in gratitude. All to be returned in worship. A worship from the heart and through the hands open to thanking God for that which I might never have chosen along with that in which I delight in embracing.
Every day can be full or faint in thanksgiving, depending on what the Holy Spirit sees in my heart and mind. Because all too often, what He sees is in me is of my own creation, not His. Thus, the need for Him to recreate me into the Image of Christ through a continual grace-giving of conviction, forgiveness, and repentance. Which is exactly why every day should be a celebration of creation in what I see around me and alive in me – God the Father at work in the natural world and the Holy Spirit at work in my nature as a sinner now declared a saint by Jesus, the One Who holds all creation together for now and the not-yet (see Colossians 1:15-17).
written by and copyrighted to Beth Madison, Ph.D., 2022
Soul Scientist 