Thanksgiving Yearnings

Blessings to you and your family this Thanksgiving. I would encourage each of us to bow with me and reflect upon how even on our most discouraging and helpless days there are blessings we can be thankful for. This is a day to put aside that which weighs us down and thank God for even the smallest awareness of life's gifts and bounties. We are, for God has graced our being. This is also a day, inherent in the word Thanksgiving itself, of giving, of ourselves, our bounties, in thankfulness for our blessings. Even if we can offer no more than a smile, let us graciously warm another's heart with our gift of blessing this one day of the year set aside for thoughtfully expressing thanks in the spirit of gratitude. Open your hearts to one another. May your humanity reflect divine attributes in your loving actions one towards another.

As you read these words, open your arm's wide in the spirit of gratitude and symbolically open yourself to the lives of others and draw them into your heart. Take time and visualize individually those in your life and those who come to mind as you reach outward and embrace them and feel and breathe in the connection between you. Hold them in your heart, even those who are passed on, for in this one moment they are as real to you as those you will physically encounter again. This moment is a blessing for the clouds of people past and present who are even in this brief interlude, a blessing in your life and who you can be a blessing for. Carry on the love of those who have gone before you and those who are with you still.

Know deeply that you are blessed and that as deeply as you have felt the presence of one another, God embraces you, blesses you moment by moment and goes before you in blessing to others. Let us read with new eyes the words of D&C 163 and understand how our personal thanksgiving is a moment of awareness that calls us to compassion with God towards all.....none are excluded.

"God, the Eternal Creator, weeps for the poor, displaced, mistreated, and diseased of the world because of their unnecessary suffering. Such conditions are not God’s will. Open your ears to hear the pleading of mothers and fathers in all nations who desperately seek a future of hope for their children. Do not turn away from them. For in their welfare resides your welfare."

It is difficult to read these words. It is exceedingly difficult to dwell upon those images, those sounds that come to mind. How, O Lord, do I answer the tug on my heart now that it is open? My friend, that is what Mission is all about! Together in community we can better answer that call we inwardly feel. With your heart open, in the spirit of sensed thanksgiving and your experience of blessing towards others, become a catalyst of grace and hope that opens others hearts to respond with you.

May you find peace, the peace of Christ, that dispels the burden of thanksgiving accountability through your compassionate response in Mission.  May abounding grace and fervent thanksgiving erupt with passionate self-giving from your life......today.

submitted by Kerry