Grace and Gratitude

November comes ushering in the season of crunching leaves, pumpkin pies, and thanksgiving. The month is set aside to celebrate thankfulness, yet Thanksgiving day comes solidly at the end of the month. Giving us ample time to compose our lists of things in which we are thankful, while planning out our holiday menus and filling out our Christmas list of needs (I’m sorry, I meant wants).

Despite all the opportunity to think in all my blessings, November always has me fighting the temptation to look at what I lack. Time, ideas, resources, things.

I don’t have a good thanksgiving recipe.

I don’t have a good advent study.

I haven’t yet purchased Christmas pajamas or found Miriam a new stocking.

I don’t have a plan.

Or an appointment.

Or the strength to make any sort of decision it seems, big or small.

I need. I want. I lack.

Yet, I keep coming back to a phase echoed in the recesses of my mind.

Grace and Gratitude.

I want to live a life defined by grace and abounding in gratitude. I am called to it. I was saved for it.

Grace, I do not lack.

Gratitude could be found easily if I looked off it.

“The Lord is my Shepherd: I have what I need.”

I have it in abundance.

I have life and help and provision.

I have a comforter, savior, and friend.

What I do not posses, He posses it aplenty.

Patience, forgiveness, and affection.

Strength for today and hope for tomorrow.

Grace upon grace

Set my eyes upon the One who gives freely from never ending storehouses. Let me look expectantly to the One who withholds no good thing.

So my peace comes as gratitude wells up from within, leaving no room for the worries and wants of that have plagued me.

They will creep back in, I know. But more and more I hope that I grow to live a life defined by grace and gratitude.

Not just in November, but the whole year through.

Click here to read the corresponding November Poem.