I Give Thanks…

Thank you, Lord, for my children. Each of them has blessed my life and the lives of others in unique ways. Each of them has challenged me in ways I could not have imagined; they have taught me about myself and other temperaments; they have taught me about a new kind of love. They have made me a better person.

Thank you, Lord, for the wife of my youth - for her years of giving and faithfulness; for her grace to our children and her industrious provisions for our family. Thank you for her intelligence, for our differences that challenge and bring appreciation for something wonderful I might not have known otherwise. Thank you for giving us companionship in our often individualized living and for creating one out of two

Thank you, Lord, for my parents and the family I grew up in - For the faith and righteousness that my parents exemplified and expected. Thank you for our ability to sacrifice for one another, to endure rivalry with grace, to allow for differences with appreciation. Thank you also for my extended family, for the good that was modeled in front of me, for the heritage of faith that teaches me what my own faithfulness can mean to others. Thank you for my brother’s and my sister’s family – that they have embraced me and mine with their hearts and hands.

Thank you, for your disciples, my God, who have surrounded me in times of triumph and defeat. Even in the worst of places and times, you have provided someone to minister to me. And in other times, you have given me that same opportunity. Thank you for trusting me and bringing me wholly into your family – a full participant and complete heir.

Thank you for Jesus. Thank you for stepping out from the veil of rules to reveal yourself personally to us. Thank you for enduring our worst and being encouraged by those rare moments when we truly love you deeply and completely. Thank you for letting us touch you in a crowd, or in a home, or in a place of worship; to touch your side where you were wounded, to touch your time with our common needs and habits, to touch your feet with our pain and tears, and to touch even your clothes and feel power flow into us through you. Thank you for enduring us past the point of endurance.

Thank you for the stuff of this world that you give us – for food and cars and homes and clothes; for education and jobs and prosperity. Thank you for the freedom we enjoy. Thank you for the cleansing rain, the changing seasons, the cool breeze, the shade of trees and their fruit that grows and produces by its own work on our behalf. And for so many more blessings that we cannot count, Lord…

Thank You.