Rejoice. Pray.

I have always thought that Thanksgiving was summed up in 3 verses in 1 Thessalonians.  Chapter 5, verses 16 through 18.

From the King James Bible, because I like the way it sounds, "Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you."

Two of the shortest verses in the Bible, packed with meaning, prior to one of the most powerful of commands in the Bible.  It makes me think often about my life.  I come back to these verses often.

And, I can be honest that I struggle with the order of these three verses.  I don't know if the order is important to God, but since He put it down that way, I am going with the published priority.

I am not a rejoicer.  I mean, I have been trained my whole life to isolate the error, find the problem, focus on the deficit.  In the day, it was called deficit analysis, and it was how generations of us, that do maintenance and upkeep and optimization, were trained and prioritized around failure and fault.

If you let the world, it will focus you on what is wrong.  It will require all your attention for the bumps, the troubles.  It is not how we were supposed to work.  "We were meant to run through fields of forever, singing songs to our Savior and King."  Love that line from SCC (Glorious Unfolding).  Wish I had written it.

It is very difficult to keep focus on rejoicing, especially for me.  No one wants to hear me recite all the things that are going great, when they are standing in front of me trying to figure out all the details around what has failed.  I understand that, in my position, as Dad, as a leader, as a servant, it comes with the territory.

Difficult, while hard, is not impossible.  I keep telling myself that.  Sometimes, I fail.  I mean, look, I have the same issues as everyone else, a thousand things biting at my ankles at any one time.  My issues aren't worse or bigger than any other person's, but they are mine and they are very real.  It is one of the most powerful motivators in our lives.

We allow it to overcome us at times.  It is a nifty trick in the Devil's bag.  Get us focused on things that don't work, don't happen like they should, drag us down.  Our own focus and obsession becomes focused on the broken.

When you are looking at the cracks in the sidewalk, you can't see the pattern in the mosaic.  It is that simple.  Those two short verses, Paul did not need to add any words.  Rejoice evermore.  Pray without ceasing.

We only have one Thanksgiving in the calendar, and I think that we try to find a way to pile up enough sentiment and importance, so that we don't waste it.  I won't be happier tomorrow than today.  I won't pray any deeper tomorrow than today.

It is the fourth Thursday of November, tomorrow.  That means we observe a ritual on that day in this country.  It is a beautiful sentiment, and I appreciate that we set it aside to do so.  But, we need to use all of our days for it.

And, we need to remember the prelude.  Rejoice, pray.  I pray that you rejoice with family, friends and thanks.  Find the reasons that matter, remember, it is really a good life.  That is the secret we don't talk often enough about.  Especially me.  It is really a good life.

What lives matter, terrorists, refugees, crime, taxes, all that stuff, it is a burden.  It is not that we should ignore it, or not address it.  But, we should not let it take away our joy in being us.  We were made to run in fields of forever.  I would rather run smiling, laughing and singing, than run screaming with terror because the T-Rex is chasing me.  We get to make that choice.  Really, there is no T-Rex to run away from, and there is a whole lot of joy to run toward.  Honest.

That is what I am focused on today.  Praying, rejoicing.  I have so much to be happy about.  We all do. And nothing bad that happens to us really has any power over the good in our lives. The only person or thing that has power over the good in our lives is us.  We can choose how we respond to the good and the bad.  I am going to try to do the praying and rejoicing.  That leads to the thanking, and that is for tomorrow.

GLYASDI.