Once Upon A Time. . .

Learning to be Thankful

December 9, 2010 at 10:01 pm (Uncategorized)

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’m trying to believe that people still look at my blog, though I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t.  But, for anyone who still does, I hope this post will encourage you.

Several weeks ago, I started to write a post, and halfway through it I realized that almost the whole thing was filled with my complainants. Something inside of me screamed at myself and told me to shut up and stop writing if you have nothing profitable to say. Since then, I have not written anything (I hadn’t even tried.) I deleted what I had written and forgot about the incident. Since then, several things had only stirred the complaining spirit in me. I’ve noticed myself so many times even asking God “Why?” And no, it wasn’t a godly why, it was an irritated, whining that I hadn’t been awakened to yet.

I believe the very first thing that made me see this was one chilly Monday evening in November (I think.) I was sweeping the kitchen floor and pondering over the different things going on in my life. Discontented with my present situations, I yelled in my head and said, “God, why this? Why to me?” I shocked myself. I couldn’t believe I had become so callus to my spoiled and ungrateful heart.

There’s always been this part of me that could never understand why we were put through such hard trials. Of course the typical “It’s so you can learn to trust God and to be made stronger” was the first thing I would always think of. That was never good enough for me ( it should have been.) At any rate, it wasn’t cutting my present pain. All I could think about was “Why?” I thought, trusting God is one thing, understanding why He picked this trial in particular was another. It always seems as though the things we go through are always the ones that we think of as “the worst,” the ones that get us in particular. The ones that we would pick last if we had a list of trials to pick from.

Okay, now I’m going to try to merge my two themes; complaining and trials. But first, one more thing that really helped me see the truth about myself. I did what anyone should do if they really want to know the truth, ask a friend who you know will tell you the truth, well, they did. And it went like this, (Me) “Hey, do you think I complain a lot?” (Friend) “Not a ton, but…I guess you kind of do have a tendency to complain.” Ouch! But hey, they were right.

As if that wasn’t enough for me to see, God did one more thing to show me how thankful I ought to be. He set my house on fire. Well, I guess I did technically. I lit the candle. I left it burning. I went to bed and forgot to blow it out. I woke up at 2:30 to smoke filling my house and everyone yelling. After we put it out, my dad said, two more minutes and some, if not all, of us would not have gotten out.  I a still having some difficulty sleeping. But here’s why that trial is so important to me; I didn’t complain. Why would I? Yes it was a terrible and horrifying thing, but God saved me and the rest of my family from something so terrible. It was the first time in a while where I felt truly thankful. No buts, or what ifs. It doesn’t matter if our piano is all black and our whole house smells of smoke. God protected us! It’s a very unreal feeling when something happens that you would normally complain about but you just can’t because of what God did (or didn’t let happen) in the process . I think it taught me to think that way all of the time because I never know what He’s going to do. But I do know that He loves me and that everything he does is only for my good, and that, right there should be enough to make me thankful.  I feel like He just opened my eyes to see how things really were. He showed me that He is good and even if everything else on earth was as terrible as it could possibly be (which, it totally isn’t)  I still have an unfathomably awesome God and there is just no room for complaining.

That truth is the very reason it will be possible for me to go through difficult trials. I know why He puts me through the hard ones now…because He’s going to use them to show me how amazing He is when He saves me from them! He’s going to make me love Him more and more. But, if I spend the trial complaining, I’ll certainly miss what He’s trying to show me.

So, I will learn to love the trials because I know that through them, God will not make me stronger, He’ll show me  how weak I am and  how  strong He really is. He’ll show me how impossible it is for me to make this on my own, how much I need Him, how much He loves me. Of course this will be something I will always fight against. A sin this cultivated doesn’t disappear over night. So bear with me as I go on this lifelong journey, as God teaches me to always be thankful.

Sarah