Key Ingredients

“Thankfulness is one of those key ingredients that you should add into everything.”

Loren Thornburg

As we start cooking we gather our list and head to the store making sure each ingredient it accounted for. Some ingredients are more key than others so that if they were forgotten or missing on the day of cooking we could make do without them. However there are other ingredients that are crucial in the combination. Fruit salad without the fruit, mashed potatoes without the potatoes, pumpkin pie without the pumpkin. Those dishes just don’t work without the basics and neither do our lives. Sometimes in the midst of making shopping lists for dinner we forget the things we most need to make sure we have for our lives. Thankfulness is one of those ingredients. It’s like butter. It makes everything taste better. With more thankfulness in the mix you can’t help but find a little more joy and a little more life. There is so much to be thankful for even when things get really hard. What are the ingredients do you need in your life right now? Don’t forget the thankfulness when you look at the recipe of your life.

“Be joyful always, pray at all times, be thankful in all circumstances. This is what God wants from you in your life in union with Christ Jesus.”

1 Thessalonians 5:18 Good News Translation

I am so glad God isn’t asking us to be joyful ‘for’ everything or thankful ‘for’ everything but to be thankful ‘in’ the midst of those things. There are some things that I am not thankful for or joyful for but God is asking that I would chose to look to Him and remember that ‘in’ Him I can be thankful still. I can still pray ‘in’ Him even when times are hard. I can still find joy ‘in’ Him even when the outcome doesn’t look good. I can still be thankful ‘in’ Him, for who He is and remember the gifts He has given me even in the circumstances that look beyond repair. This still doesn’t mean that I have to be fake about who I am and how I am doing, but that I can choose to remember who God is and the life He has given me in Jesus above and within the things that are hard. I can be both walking through a hard season but finding joy and thanks. I can have union with Jesus and all that Jesus is and all that Jesus brings; in all the peace, joy, life and freedom. Those things are offered to me. That is reason to see joy, reason to pray, reason to be thankful. This is what God wants from me because He wants it for me.