thankfulness

Gratitude...goes beyond "mine" and "thine" and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

Henri Nouwen

On Thursday nights I lead a small group of freshman girls. Tonight we were talking about Thanksgiving and what living in thankfulness looks like. I really love what Nouwen says above about gratitude -- that we can move from it being a spontaneous response to circumstances to a lived discipline. I told the girls that this week I wanted to take time each day to acknowledge someone (or perhaps something) that I am grateful for in an effort to begin to cultivate this discipline of gratitude.

Together our small group made thankfulness boards with clippings from magazines and words and writing to help remind us to contemplate the things we are grateful for.

So this week before Thanksgiving I want to start acknowledging and celebrating the people and things that I so deeply appreciate and care about. There are so many, but here's to 7...The first being these high school girls. I've been thinking a lot lately about what a gift it is to have the chance to be involved in these girls lives. We spent this past weekend in the Outer Banks. There were incredibly honest, vulnerable conversations. There were tears, there was a great deal of laughter. There were three words repeated ad nauseam: special, awkward and random. Oh, high school girls. But I love them, regardless of their inability to use more than three adjectives. And I am so grateful for what they teach me, for their zeal for living and experiencing life. I am so often so impressed by their lives -- what they have gone through and learned, what they have experienced and processed. It is a gift to be with them, it is a gift to be together in this season of life and it is a gift to walk with them as we wrestle with who God is and what he has for us as his beloved.