Hey gang! Have you been as thankful for this week as I have? I sure hope so! As promised, there’s one more day of {Thanks}giving here for you, today!

Grace Kinne has a beautiful guest post to share with you today. She is a well-named young lady after God’s own heart. We share an affinity for the culinary arts and decorating, and we enjoyed life and church and good and not-so-good weather together during my four years in Scotland. She blogs at grace. Her words are grace-filled, and I hope they’ll be an encouragement to you!

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Vulnerable Thanksgiving

I woke up this morning to great lashings of rain against my window. ‘Ah November. How I love you’, I thought. It’s on days like this that I find it hard not to succumb to the Anne-of-Green-Gables-Depths-of-Despair-ness. Oh the melodrama.

But in all seriousness, it is in the dark and cold of coming winter (or, if you are anywhere near the North Sea like I am, the very much arriving winter) that we are called and reminded to celebrate a day of giving thanks.

Honestly, though, I find it hard in the day-to-dayness of this thing we call Life. I get discouraged so easily. Before me, all I can see is a bleak, cold land. Barren. This seemingly endless search for a job, a purpose, has led me to the bewildered and twisted places in my soul that I would rather have let fester quietly in the dark. I question my value, my place, my foundations.

I have felt recently like I’m trying to hold warring parts of my soul together, desperately grabbing through my tears at some sort of future. Some sort of hope. Why is this disorienting time of waiting, longing for a ‘something’ to sink my hands into, so very prolonged? I wake up each morning fighting. Fighting to believe that He has a purpose for me; that this wait is not empty, but it is paradoxically a time of fullness.

It is in these times of barrenness that we are most vulnerable. And when we are most vulnerable, our thanksgiving has the most power for our souls – for we truly have nothing else to cling to. It lifts us out, placing us on our Indestructable Foundation.

‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength….’ (Isaiah 30:15).

For it is when I am quiet, when I am still and remember….I know. I know that He is God. I remember Who He is. I remember my salvation. And suddenly, my barrenness is swept aside in the torrent of His grace. His grace that delights to remember and pour into the barren, the empty, the foolish, and the forgotten.

What makes it a vulnerable thanksgiving, though, is that I still don’t seem to see where the path is leading. It’s vulnerable because in thanking Jesus for where I’m at, I am trusting that the ‘boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance’, that He has ‘made my lot secure’ (Psalm 16). I am trusting again. Again and again and again and again. I am trusting that He is my Answer. Not a job. Not a duty. Not a purpose. He alone is my Answer. He alone is my Provision. He alone is my God. This vulnerablity of thanksgiving is oddly freeing. I am free to rest in His provision, grace, and presence. To just breathe.

So November? Rain away. Rain all you want. My God is stronger….and though I might not be able to see just yet, I’m trusting that around a corner, tucked away in a wee cobbled alley, is a sunny, wooded path. As Anne Shirley says, ‘There’s always a bend in the road’, for….’God’s in His heaven and all is right.’

Surely that assurance is worthy of our utmost, vulnerable, and heart-full thanksgiving?

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Grace is a girl who doesn’t currently pay taxes (one definite benefit of being unemployed!). But she finds herself quite busy nonetheless; cobbling together a random assortment of daily activities she loves as well as loathes, such as: experimenting with random recipes, exploring the hidden coffee shops of Edinburgh, and writing job applications. She is also rather fond of the word nonetheless.

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Thank you SO much for these words, Grace. I am going to read this again. And again.

xCC