Thanksgiving

With Thanksgiving day approaching this week. I wanted my weekly post to be about the virtue of Thankfulness. Because I believe deeply that gratitude and thanksgiving are the pillars for joy. St. Paul in Col 3:17, says, "Dedicate yourself to thankfulness," If it was easy, he wouldn't use the word dedicate yourself. In sports or in business, when we really want to win, we dedicate ourselves to the things we are weakest at. In playing basketball, I had a horrible time dribbling and shooting with my left hand, I would get my shot blocked all the time, because I would try and drive from the left side, but shoot with my right hand. If I wanted to get better, I knew I would have to dedicate myself to getting a left hand. I actually started brushing my teeth with my left hand, eating cereal with my left hand, etc. Long story short, by the end of a summer, I could do anything in basketball with my left hand.
Becoming a thankful person is hard, but its so important, because it speaks to what we think about God. Do we believe He is an angry dictator, or an enforcer, or is He the Father of Love. If He's the enforcer, why be thankful. There's a great line, "people are entitled to their own opinion, their not entitled to their own facts," Here's the facts, would a God that is an angry dictator, that had no regard for our weakness, suffer and die on a cross? No way. We worship the God of Love, that is the truth, St. Peter says, "Cast your cares upon Him, for He cares for you," Thanksgiving is an act of Faith, every time we thank God for something, we are affirming the truth about who He is, that He is the God of Love, and that with Him we have nothing to fear.
This may take an entire attitude change, maybe we have lived our whole life angry at the hand we have been dealt, angry about our past, angry about our weakness. Thankfulness takes time, but we can't forget that it also takes work, we have to dedicate ourselves to it. But every time we thank God, it will bear so much fruit in how we view the world. There's no better time to start than the week of Thanksgiving.
Just a quick plug for the movie "The blindside," we saw it over the weekend, and really liked it, loved the line, when a rich friend of the couple that is adopting Michael Oher, says, "wow, you are really going to change this poor young man, to give him a bright future," and she corrects her with the words, "no, he is changing me". Pope Benedict in his book Jesus of Nazareth says the beauty of the Good Samaritan is that every time we try and be a neighbor to our brother, we are actually found by Him.