FOR AND IN ALL THINGS

 

A week ago today we celebrated Thanksgiving, a day that marked the beginning of the holiday season. Every day since I’ve contemplated the practice of gratitude for every blessing. 

I love prayer walks, a time of reflecting on the beauty of the earth, a time to ponder God’s amazing color scheme in fall leaves. And the winter sky on a cold day so blue it takes your breath away with childlike wonder – a wonder often lost in adulthood. 

It may sound cliché, the gratitude subject. I’d be like yeah, yeah, if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times. The old gratitude platitude.

But I’m telling you, this one practice changes everything. Not only in you, but in those around you. Many years ago my neighbor who looked to be 100 years old began ailing. One day she said to me, “I can’t complain. I count my blessings every day that God sends. He’s been mighty good.”

For some reason this left a lasting impression on me. It’s one of the memories I can’t forget because the Holy Spirit keeps bringing it up, rewinding the scene of this aged woman sitting before me who celebrated life and gave thanks in all things. Who lived out the practice until the day she died.

The daily practice of gratitude strengthens the spirit to withstand hard times and face perils you’d never have imagined you’d encounter. I’m reminded of a scene replayed a thousand times in my mind of Betsy Ten Boom in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Her gratitude for the first meal served there: watered-down turnip soup.

Corrie’s reaction: “God doesn’t expect us to give thanks for this?”

Of course he doesn’t, but the exercise of gratitude still stood for Betsy, for it had apparently been a long-held exercise: gratitude in all things.

What are you grateful for on this day that God has made?

As I reflect on the daily practice of gratitude, a song I wrote awhile back surfaced, a song I’ll share with you below.

https://soundcloud.com/debra-elramey/we-give-thanks

 

Eternity's Sunrise

Emily’s poem is a creed of mine. To ease suffering in this fallen world. To heal and tend to every creature that crosses my path.

But you know, if you have lived and loved, the steep price of attachment to the least of these in God’s animal kingdom: the ferals and homeless creatures that show up unbidden, hungry for affection and food, for shelter and warmth. Some at death’s door…

 After resurrecting a black kitten from the dead via dropper and prayer and tender loving care…

After watching her spring back to life and become a wild panther pouncing in the woodland behind the house…

After seeing her work up an insatiable appetite for storebought treats and delectables, pricey but worth every cent…

After observing her routine at nightfall, how she’d come in on time like clockwork, then curl up on my chair and sleep until morning light…

~*~

And after the memory months earlier of holding her close enough to hear my heartbeat and praying half the night with lit candle before us, certain that in her weak infant condition –

God would surely fetch her any minute and carry her like a little lamb in the crook of his arm across the rainbow bridge…

But instead she is miraculously healed and she turns into a spry panther stalking anything that moves. 

Until the day, three weeks ago on a cold windy Saturday, she disappeared. We called for days. Day and night we walked around calling, “Mitzi.”  But no sign of her.

The hardest part of life is the veil of tears. And with every new grief old wounds open like graves of resurrected souls.

Poetry is salve to heart wounds. Prose falls short amid sorrow. Mary Oliver still speaks to me in times like these:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it

go,

to let it go.

William Blake, after centuries, still speaks:

What poems or scriptures

have most comforted you

in your times of loss and grief?