If there is one trait in this life that will give you a rich, fulfilling one, it is GRATITUDE.
The ability to see the beauty in simple pleasures; the ability to let what you have blind you to the things you don’t.
Gratitude is knowing that God is enough, no matter what your circumstances.
Gratitude is not taking your life for granted. It is remembering that a healthy body is a gift, a warm house is not a right, and food at every meal is a luxury to most of the world.
Children, I won’t apologize to you because you don’t have all the technological gadgets your peers do. I am not sad that we can’t buy you your own car when you turn sixteen, or that you are saving your money to buy a special thing you’ve been wanting. From my observation of the world these forty years, those things will help you.
Gifts are nice when they are gifts, but they can be too much. So much that you forget, and take for granted, and become ungrateful and feel entitled.
I love you too much for that. I praise God with the psalmist for having “neither too little nor too much”. I thank Him for daily bread and I want you to grow up doing the same. I want you to find contentment in simplicity, looking to the relationships around you for your deepest joy.
Gratitude is so easily robbed in our culture! We live the largest irony in stating that “money doesn’t make you happy” and then sacrificing our lives to disprove our theory.
So, I pray this Thanksgiving season that you would hold on to gratitude. Be thankful for every sunrise, every warm bowl of soup, every night your Daddy comes home, for every clean item of clothing in your closet, for peace, when others are at war….be thankful, and even if it were all taken away, tune your hearts to say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord!”
By Kelly Crawford
Kelly Crawford is a mom of nine kids who has a passion for inspiring and encouraging women to build godly homes. She has been writing on her website Generation Cedar for over five years, tackling tough issues like birth control, homeschooling and the degradation of the American culture and family. Generation Cedar is named so because she desires to encourage families to raise the next generation for the glory of God–firmly planted and flourishing “like a cedar in Lebanon”. She is also a featured speaker at the 2014 Christian Heritage Conference.
“Once Brothers” © 2012 Vincent_AF, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
