It’s not about some principled debate as to whether I should focus on what I have, or on what I don’t have. Rather, it’s about being thankful that I have the privilege to enjoy the former, and the opportunity to contemplate the latter.

If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.

Oh that we might have the wisdom to stop, lean down and pick up the scattering of things that we’ve so thoughtlessly discarded along the way. For if we were to do so, we would suddenly find ourselves holding the very treasures that we’d been looking for all along.

Being thankful reminds us that if it’s broken it’s an opportunity.

The greatest gifts come in the most tattered wraps.

Thankfulness always sees everything as a gift even though it might be wrapped in some rather unsavory wrapping paper, for the wrapping need not dictate the contents.

If I’m a slave to thankfulness I will never to be a slave to that which I’m thankful for. And the fact of the matter is that slavery to thankfulness is freedom from everything else.

Thankfulness is far more than the key that tenderly and rather gracefully unshackles me from all that binds me. Rather, it is in fact the sledgehammer that shatters the shackles. And that’s the best kind of key I can think of.

Thanksgiving is a posture of both mind and heart where we recognize how terribly fortunate we are, and how much we’ve been blessed despite the fact that we probably haven’t been the blessing that we should have been.