You’re sitting at your designated spot at the dinner table, the NFL theme music playing behind you and a heaping plate of turkey and sweet potatoes in front of you. You bow your head and close your eyes as someone at the head of the table says grace. You open your eyes, and the forkful of stuffing is halfway to your mouth when another family member asks the classic question.
“What are you thankful for this year?”
If you’re anything like me, the responses that jump to your mind are something like these: I’m thankful for my family. My friends. My health. My job. My house. My freedom. My faith.
We like to take this moment to name the obvious blessings in our lives, the people and circumstances and things that fill us with joy. And doing so is a beautiful practice. God loves to get the glory for the good things He’s given us. He appreciates when we take time to thank Him for the ways we’ve experienced His abundant kindness.
But what if the responses sounded like this? I’m thankful for…
My cancer diagnosis.
My car accident.
My deep loss.
My financial troubles.
My mental illness.
My difficult relationship.
What would happen if we began to name the hard things in our lives as blessings? If we sat around the Thanksgiving table — or around the dinner table on a Tuesday night in July — and expressed gratitude for the phone call that made us cry that morning? The relationship that brings us to our knees in prayer multiple times a day? The anxiety that kept us up late into the night, pleading with God to free us from the constant sense of fear thrumming in our chests?
Before I continue, I want you to know that this is not a message of toxic positivity. We serve a God who allows and even encourages us to lament over the brokenness of this world, to embrace the full spectrum of human emotion.
If you doubt this because you’ve been fed a different message from the church, just look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane or at the tomb of Lazarus. Even our fully God and fully human Savior experienced “negative” emotions like fear, grief, hurt, and anger. He was not immune to the painful effects of the fall, and He does not expect us to be, either.
I don’t know that I would ever call something like cancer or depression a gift. I don’t think God would, either. Pain and death was not part of His original design for His creation. It is not in His plan for His redeemed creation, either. They are a product of the curse we’re all living under, the one we brought upon ourselves when we chose to be our own gods.
But I do believe that the true God is good and powerful enough to bring gifts from even those most broken parts of our lives. (Romans 8:28) I know this because I have experienced it for myself. Over and over I have seen my God show up in the places that seemed irredeemable.
He has set me free from years of living as a slave to fear and anxiety.
He has been faithful through the loss of loved ones.
He has been a sweet friend to me through almost three decades of singleness. (And He, along with some very good friends, are now a source of wisdom and peace as I navigate my first relationship.)
He has taken my deepest shame and is turning it into a story that lets me shout His glory.
No, I have never sat at a Thanksgiving table and proclaimed thanks for my anxiety disorder or for my grandparents who died too young. But when I think about how the Lord has used these awful circumstances to draw me closer to His heart, I find that my own heart begins to brim with gratitude. When you have a God who chose to endure the greatest suffering possible because of His love for you, you can trust that He will turn your own suffering into something beautiful.
He will use it to shape you into someone like Him.
So I open my teary eyes from that dinner table prayer, and I take a moment to thank God for the invisible gift of a soul that looks a little more like my Savior.
Then I whisper amen and dig into those sweet potatoes.
ABOUT OUR BLOGGER
Kati Lynn Davis grew up in Chester County. After a brief stay on the other side of Pennsylvania to earn a writing degree from the University of Pittsburgh, she returned to the area and got a job working for a local library. When she isn’t writing, Kati enjoys reading, drawing, watching movies (especially animated ones!), drinking bubble tea, hanging out with her family cat, and going for very slow runs. Kati is pretty sure she’s an Enneagram 4 but is constantly having an identity crisis over it, so thankfully she’s learning to root her sense of self in Jesus.
LOOKING FOR MORE FOR YOUR SOUL?
To read more blogs written by Kati Lynn, just CLICK HERE.
The ARCHIVES page in the menu above includes five years of blogs sorted by topic.