While you read the rest of this blog, I want you to remember that “thanksgiving” is an action. Thanksgiving is the act of lifting up our gratefulness to God. It’s about going directly to the source of your joy and personally thanking him for pouring blessings into your life.
Thanksgiving as a holiday is typically depicted as a time for family gatherings, delicious home-made meals, turkey and tying your laces in preparation for Black Friday. Over the last several years, my Thanksgiving meal has been from Cracker Barrel with my parents and siblings. It sounds odd, but those meals were some of my favorite Thanksgiving meals to date. What I’m getting at is Thanksgiving looks different to every family and we all have our own ways of doing it.
This year I’m breaking tradition in more ways than one, obviously. I’m in a foreign country away from my family and very very very far away from Cracker Barrel. This Thanksgiving has been spent cleaning windows, sweeping cobwebs away, pushing eager children on swings and taking my friend Claudia on walks around the school. As I sit here looking around the room at each of my teammates, I am acutely aware of just how necessary this Thanksgiving is.
I’m so thankful for each of their servant hearts and they’ve made my first holiday away from home into a great one.
Here are a few things I’ve become thankful for that I took for granted before the Race:
A bed to myself. A bed because in this neighborhood, a family of five will typically share one queen-sized bed as that’s all they can afford.
Clean water from the tap. If anything were going to make me sick, it would be the water.
A shower (Hot or cold, it really doesn’t matter). On the race, showers are total gifts. They aren’t guaranteed and they almost always are cold. I’m thanksgiving for ours being hot sometimes and its existence in general!
A grocery store within walking distance. Since starting the Race, there’s no such thing as driving. We walk mostly everywhere, including to school and to pick up groceries. If the grocery store wasn’t within walking distance, we would be using public transportation to buy milk.
The near limitless opportunities I have as a middle-class woman from the United States. The average Chilean family makes $29,000 USD per year. In our neighborhood, a family of five can be expected to make around $12,000 per year or less.
I’m learning what it looks like to take time out of my day to day life and give that time to God as a gift of thanks. He created me with hands so that they can be raised to him in an act of gratitude. He granted me a voice so that I might be able to share these revelations with people all around the world. Most importantly he gave the greatest gift of all so that I can live a life of unrelenting joy. He gave his only son’s life, stretched out and brutally nailed to a wooden cross in a perfect effort to save me from my sin. I would wager that’s a pretty good reason to give thanks!
This Thanksgiving, I’m actually giving thanks to God. That’s a tradition that I won’t be giving up anytime soon.
