Thankful (Tim Smith)

I woke up on Thanksgiving morning to the sound of my children laughing and playing with their grandparents. Since their grandparents live thousands of miles away, it's always great to hear that sound, and I was thankful.

It was just into double digits in the morning, and I was thankful for the chance to sleep late. The parade on TV was almost over, and since I don't like the parade, that made me even more thankful. I knew I was in for a day that would be dominated by eating a great meal with family and friends, and watching football for several hours while digesting said meal and eating pie, and for all this I was truly thankful.

Thanksgiving did turn out to be a great day at the Smith's, and I was thankful. Black Friday brought my Dad and I the task of hanging the Christmas lights on my house (broken lights caused momentary non-thankfulness) while Julie went shopping with my Mom and Sister and the kids (thankfully not me.) Later Julie and I bought our Christmas tree, brought it home, and (she and the kids) decorated it, and I found reasons, again, to be thankful.

So much concentrated thankfulness. Somewhere late Friday or early Saturday, with the Holiday's turkey and football memories receding into the past, a disturbing little thought began to nag at me--am I still thankful?

Thankfulness is big business in our culture today. Oprah preaches a doctrine of positive thinking including daily thankfulness. Deborah Norville, of TV's Inside Edition, has just released a book called Thank You Power: Making The Science Of Gratitude Work For You. It seems people are attempting to co-opt thankfulness and turn it into something we can use to make ourselves healthier, wiser, or richer.

But I'm not buying. As a Christian, I want to obey the Biblical command to "be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus." (1 Thess. 5:18, NLT) Thankfulness that truly comes from the heart is offered in view of what has already been done for me, not as a way to manipulate some future benefit.

So I wonder--am I still thankful? Am I thankful in all my circumstances? If I'm thankful to be a citizen of the most blessed nation humanity has ever known, shouldn't that motivate me to use my resources to respond to a world with entirely too much poverty, disease, and preventable death? If I'm thankful to be one of the tiny percentage of people on the planet to get an American university education, shouldn't that motivate me to use that education to respond to the needs of the lost and dying the world over?

So I'll keep wondering if I am still thankful. And time will tell.