Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not put out the Spirit's fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good.
I Thessalonians 5:16-21
I sat down last night to write this, and absolutely nothing came. No ideas. No inspiration. Nothing. And so I woke up early this morning, turned to the concordance in my Bible, and looked up "thanks/thankfulness," thinking I'd quote one of the Psalms, what with Thanksgiving approaching. Instead, I found this verse from Thessalonians and read it over and over. Can you imagine how much better life would be if we just followed this one verse? If we really were joyful always—and there's a difference between being happy and joyful. There's a difference between being unhappy, which we all are at one time or another, and truly losing our sense of deep-down joy. What if we really were thankful in all circumstances? My mother is. She really is. No matter what she faces, she gives thanks to God and trusts Him to see her through it. I'm trying to learn that from her—still—and hope I've come closer to it with each of my 49 years. "Do not put out the Spirit's fire." If I think about the times when I've felt the most attuned to the Spirit—the power and peace of it—and then compare that to the awful sense of floundering that comes from letting go and drifting, I wonder why I would ever let that happen. But I sometimes have. I sometimes do. The last two short sentences in this verse maybe spoke to me the most. "Test everything. Hold on to the good." Here they're talking about prophecy, but I couldn't help reading them in light of the past year, as Dave and I left behind the security of my job and struck out in an uncertain but exciting direction, praying it somehow all works out. We're definitely testing everything, looking for the good, and trying to hold onto it. I can look back over months gone by, over days and weeks when it seemed like we weren't getting anywhere, and see . . . direction. I can see pieces of the winding path that's slowly bringing us into the light of day. And I am thankful.
[Photo by Alexander Flash at freerangestock.com]
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