“To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.”
-Johannes A. Gaertner
These past couple weeks on the race has been hard. There has been a lot of things that have took a toll on my squad and team. Lots of people have bad stuff going on at home, thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, mourning leaving this amazing place we love and thinking about leaving our team leader in a week. It has been hard and God has been giving me deep empathy for the people I love around me so I have been hurting and sad which is so outside of my character.
Since being here in Kampot I have learned so much about thankfulness and approaching the Lord first with gratitude. It has come pretty easy to me these last couple months because I love my life. I live in the most beautiful village, get to go to peoples homes and tell people about Jesus, walk around picking flowers with my students and pour into and laugh my head off with my team. This month has been full of blessings for me. I could always easily say “wow, thanks God”, for the things that were good right in front of me.
However, this last week when I was down, having a negative attitude and a personal pitty party I was struggling to come with thankfulness. I realized what I was doing and told myself I had to write down what I was thankful for, but it didn’t work I was still annoyed. I continued to do this and then just went on with my day.
Some thing I discovered though is that God calls us to thankfulness always. He is not calling us to thankfulness because it will make us feel better but because He deserves all of the praise and all of the glory.
This week has been full of grateful celebrations. On Monday we had worship and got to do some art of what we are thankful for and have communion with the King praising and thanking Him for His ultimate sacrifice. Then I got to go to Phnom Penh on Tuesday to stock up on American thanksgiving food and started the festivities with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Dominos pizza. Wednesday was basically our thanksgiving day. We cooked all day and got our nails done, made the table setting beautiful and got all dressed up.
Our night of thanksgiving dinner made me so emotional. Everything about the moment was beautiful: the food, the table, the people and the place. Jesus has blessed me so deeply with the the community I am in right now. We all went around the table saying what we were thankful for and it was so cool to see my new family come together like that. I am so thankful that this whole week was full of thankfulness celebrations to rally show me that where m y heart always needs to be.
As I go through the race and am about to encounter a lot of change I am going to hold on to gratitude. Because God deserves all of the praise and glory. And I don’t know about you but I want to be touching Heaven.
