Counting it All Joy

By Mary

It's November and a lot of my Facebook friends are taking the time to list something they're thankful for every day of the month. I like seeing their lists...it makes me feel like people are taking the time to enjoy the season of Thanksgiving, instead of just skipping straight from costumes and candy into lights and presents with a quick pit-stop on Turkey Day.

It happens that in our little women's study group, we've been going through the book One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp. I've read it a little over two years ago and it seems to fresh but at the same time I think some of the principles and perspectives that God taught me through it the first time are fairly well cemented in my life and it leaves me free to dig a little deeper in some ways.

And I've realized my serious lack of thankfulness in hard places of my marriage. I can do it for everything else when I set myself to it--every difficult thing as a mom, a friend, anything. But I'm so reluctant to give God thanks at times when our relationship isn't what it should be (and maybe also the times when it's just not what I want it to be)

I think part of my problem is, I've stopped viewing my life in it's entirety as my job. If I'm God's ambassador, God's steward, I'm on the clock all the time. I get to thinking I'm supposed to have breaks where life becomes about me, not Him, His will, His ways. In my other roles in life I think I do better with self-sacrifice, remember to minister and forget expectations, while as a wife I've allowed myself to be demanding. And I justify it at first--I am after all only wanting God's plan, right? The way He wants it to be, right? I don't see this habit of dissatisfaction creeping in until it hits me one day that I've completely lost sight of the wonderful person my husband is, and is towards me. If there's anybody standing in the way of what should be in our relationship, it's me.

I  catch myself thinking "be thankful? For what? Why be thankful about this frustration and that annoyance, about now?" But really the question is, "why not be thankful?" Do I really think there's a better alternative? That irritability, bitterness or anything else is going to do anything for me besides turning me into a person that I don't even want to have to be around?

"You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet God's beloved children curse it because they do not know what it is" (-Jean-Pierre de Caussade)

I don't think James was simply being poetic or inspirational when he said "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds". I think Paul was pretty literal when he instructed "give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you". And I'm learning (again and again and again) that it's really the only way I want to live.