I cannot picture eating turkey on the fourth Thursday in November anywhere other than my grandparents’ rural Tennessee home. Perched on a hill and surrounded by trees, their home is large and sunny with an embankment on the back side that slopes downward toward a small pond where I spent every summer of my life alternately baiting my own hook to fish and then swimming when my Mom decided not to worry about the unmissable smell of pond water and stain of red dirt. In July we filled buckets of blueberries from the ten-foot bushes on the ridge across the pond. In the fall we practiced shooting rifles, and one particularly cold winter, we skated across the frozen pond.
Every Thanksgiving of my thirty-five years, I’ve taken a walk through my grandparents’ wooded acreage after a button-popping dinner of turkey and dressing. Those walks evolved over the years from adventurous romps through the trees with my aunt and siblings to solitary meanderings during my teenage and college years to hand-holding strolls with my husband to curious foraging with my son.
This year we’re forced to start new traditions.
It’s been a long, hard year.
My grandmother died in January after years of living under the thumb of the cruel master we call Alzheimer’s.
My youngest son’s arduous adoption process finally settled with permanency in March, though its fractured effects have been felt long since.
In September my mother fell off a ladder and introduced us all to the ominous world of brain tumors.
In some ways, this year was as hard as last year, and last year was the hardest of my life. But I’m thankful for it in all its complex and fearsome interruptions. It’s only when the security of normalcy unravels that you find yourself clambering for what is unmovable. Threaded tightly with pain and suffering is God’s unwavering, untattered goodness.
You can never learn that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have.
~Corrie Ten Boom
Think about it. When have you learned the most about God’s nearness and unfailing love. Was it when life sailed by with regular, untroubled normalcy? Probably not. You didn’t know how much you needed Him when things were calm and unrippled.
Likely, it was when your world was falling apart and ripping at the seams. Scrambling for something to hold on to, you anchored yourself to Christ. You realized in your aching that He could be trusted with your heart. You saw your suffering as an avenue for drawing near to Jesus in way you didn’t know you needed when life wasn’t so messy or fragmented.
Here’s how to be thankful when you’ve had a hard year: don’t waste a moment of what’s shattering around you. View it as the means for seeing the faithfulness of God. In giving us the gospel, He gave us Himself for always for every painful piece of life. You can be thankful during hardship because the Lord saturates your suffering with His presence. You can persevere because Immanuel–God with us.
Sing with Silas in the prison, hold firm with Paul on the crucible of persecution, enjoy the communion of Christ in solitary confinement with the exiled John, say with Peter, “where else can we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.”
This holiday season, let’s practice thankfulness for the experiences of life that serve as catalysts for deeper trust in God’s goodness. If not for them, how solid would our faith be? This is how God uses all circumstances for your good.
I hope you find many ordinary ways to express your thankfulness this week.
The Lord is unaccountably good to us.
Today we’re gathering around my parent’s dining room table on Thanksgiving for the first time. I’ll help my mom more than usual, and we’ll laugh about how slowly her hair is growing back after the surgeon shaved her head before surgery in October. My grandmother’s absence will be prominent; we’ll laugh and cry in the mixture of old and new memories. My youngest son’s busy, silly antics will remind us that last year we cried through every significant holiday moment for fear that it would be our first and last ones with him.
We’ll look back and remember all the ways the Lord has been good to us. We’ll feel love, loss, and remnants of fear, and we’ll know that Jesus walked with us through every moment of 2016.
And we’ll be thankful that in every painful moment, He was near in a way we would have missed if not for the blessing of suffering.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
This was a tremendous blessing to me this morning. Beautifully written♡
What a tender, lovely read. Thank you for sharing your heart, Glenna. Happy Thanksgiving to you xo
Thank you for these words, Glenna.
Again, thank you for sharing your heart… learning to be thankful after sorrow, in the midst of sorrow, the midst of healing can be exhausting. I find I still have to give myself Grace to learn, grace to still heal… being thankful for what you have now, what you have learned requires acknowledging the pain and that still hurts at times.
But for God… and there in is the grace of our days. But for God we wouldn’t have made it this far, but for God there would be no healing, no peace, no hope… but for God… and so because of Him we can continue, and grow, and heal, and be His light to those that are without light.
Thank you again.
This is beautiful. We’ve had a rough year too – and I felt the Lord calling me to write through it – and as you know, ’tis a hard and holy thing to do. God’s blessings to you and yours.