Thanksgiving
“I will give you thanks with all my heart; I will sing your praise before the heavenly beings. I will bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your constant love and truth. You have exalted your name and your promise above everything else.” Psalm 138:1,2 (CSB)
Next week is Thanksgiving, the national holiday when we express our thankfulness. I’ve found three aspects of thanksgiving: thanks to someone, thanks for something, and the actual gift of giving thanks. The scripture above includes all three of these aspects of thanksgiving—“…give thanks to your name for your constant love and truth.” The writer was giving thanks to God for something.
He was giving thanks to God because of the blessings He had received from Him. We usually think of giving a gift as an acknowledgement of a special occasion--birthday, Christmas, graduation, marriage, birth of baby, etc. We don’t usually give a gift because someone did something for us, but in this case we do give the gift as a thank you to someone for something he/she did. It is not an obligation, but it is an expression of appreciation. We don’t usually think of thanksgiving as the giving of a gift, but it is. Don’t you feel appreciated and blessed when someone gives you thanks?
Perhaps we have to think of that aspect of this upcoming holiday and give the gift of thanks to those we love,and to those who have blessed us in some way. It needn’t be a formal written thanksgiving note, or a long thought-out expression of appreciation, but it does need to be from the heart. (It’s easy to tell the difference between a heartfelt thanks and the flippant throwaway word of thanks, so be sincere.)
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