Give Thanks This Thanksgiving

Hey friends! I hope you enjoyed Keri’s guest post last week!! If you haven’t headed over to her site yet, you can check it out here, and subscribe. She’s a rockstar!

I’ll be honest, I was struggling this week with a topic to write about. And if I’m even more honest, I have three drafts that I wrote that I just didn’t like. They’re not bad topics, they just didn’t feel right this week. Because right now, I want to talk about gratitude, and I told myself I couldn’t because Keri wrote about it last week.

I’m gonna do it anyway.

Because it’s November, and Thanksgiving is next week and frankly, I haven’t been the most grateful lately. I’ve been struggling with not having found my “dream job”, and it’s gotten me down. I want to use my strengths and passions to make the world a better place, and I just haven’t found my sweet spot. As a result, I’ve been a little “glass half empty” and it’s not like me, but hey, we all get in a funk sometimes.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I’ve been looking back at this time last year, and how different it looks from last year. We had just purchased our home a few months earlier, and it was still very much in the renovation phase. We were blowing through cash to fix it up and I was still working as flight attendant. YIKES. Elliot was at his last job as well, and the holiday season was almost in full swing, so he was working either really early or really late and it was crazy. Oh yeah, and planning our wedding. LOLZ. What were we thinking?!?!

We were thinking that it was worth it to have a better “next year”.

And oh-my-goodness has it been better. I could not be more grateful for the change in our lives in just one year. As I sit and write on our new couch, with our TWO snoozey pups now, looking at my Christmas tree and my decorated living room, I’m really not sure how much more blessed I could be. And to think, I’m getting hung up about a JOB.

I am a crazy person. A super blessed, ridiculous, crazy person.

Rebekah last year could only DREAM of the life I’m living today. I have a job that is flexible and gives me tons of time off. Elliot has a new job that he really enjoys, has a regular schedule and weekends and holidays off. We work for the same company, so we get to have lunch together a few times a week. Also, he is just THRIVING in his career and I’m so proud of him. I have the time to see family and friends whenever I want, and raise our little pup to be the goodest girl like her sister. I picked up blogging as a new hobby, and I have found that I love to write in my little corner of the internet. Right now, I am in TWO bands and I get to play a Christmas show in like, two weeks. WHAT. Like, I have a little bio on a band website that says I’m in the band and I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. You can find it here. Honestly, listing out these blessings is just amazing and I’m currently a little overwhelmed.

When I was in college, I used to go to Marshall’s and HomeGoods with my best friend and walk around the store and dream of when I was married and had my own house so that I could decorate it for holidays and make it beautiful. It was kind of like a little goal for me. When I had a home and a family of my own, even if it was just me and my dog, I would come back and get the cute stuff.

I am currently living that dream, and I don’t care how lame that sounds. Decorating is one of my favorite things to do and I am so grateful to have a husband who doesn’t care how I decorate. He just comes home and says something sweet like “Did I just come home to the North Pole?” and l am just the happiest clam about it.

So, when I can clearly see how many blessings I have received in just one year, I can also see areas in which we have an abundance. With the change of seasons, we have been going through our clothes and realizing how much we have that we don’t need. We have extra kitchen supplies that we’ve been keeping “just in case”, and I have an 80 lb. bin of “like new” books from high school that I moved into this house, as if I’m going to reread The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. I have a Kindle. I KNOW I don’t need these books, and I also know there are a ton of teachers on my Facebook feed who would love to have these for their students. I know there are countless people in need in our community and I feel that the best way to show my gratitude for my blessings is to bless someone else.

Our church has “adopted” three families throughout the holiday season, and it’s one of my favorite ministries that we do. For Thanksgiving, we collect the food for a Thanksgiving meal for each family, and for Christmas, we collect gifts from the Angel Tree and food for their Christmas dinner. We also started a food pantry this February and collected turkeys for each of our families who visited the food pantry last week. Turkeys were on sale for 87 cents a pound! If you have an abundance where you can afford two cups of coffee at Starbucks a week, you can buy a turkey for someone who doesn’t have that abundance. After all, it’s the season of giving, and the best gift is the one you give.

As I was pulling out my Christmas decorations, I was going through the rest of the “stuff” down there. Some of it was never unpacked once we moved in, and I’m pretty sure that if we didn’t need it this year, then we probably don’t need it at all. My goal is to find new homes for the stuff that we just don’t use that someone else might need. I want to give out of my abundance, because I have been given so much.

This Thanksgiving, think about this year. Maybe a dream came true in 2019. Maybe you received a blessing you weren’t expecting. Maybe life slowed down enough for you to relax. Maybe it didn’t and you had two weddings, like me. Maybe you have more than enough, or maybe you have just enough. All of these are blessings, no matter how small. If you are reading this post, it means you have internet and a device to access it, and that right there means you already have infinitely more than the majority of the world’s population.

When you find yourself in a funk over something that seems so big, take a look at the bigger picture. I’m kind of kicking myself for being upset because I don’t have a job that I love. In the grand scheme of things, it’s relatively small, and when the time is right, God will open the right door for me. For today, I’m working on gratitude for what I have right now, because it is more than enough. And when Thanksgiving rolls around next week, I will celebrate by giving thanks for the abundant blessings I have received, and giving freely to others out of that abundance.

“You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.” 2 Corinthians 9:11

“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18