by Rev. Eric Folkerth

As we move into Thanksgiving Sunday and Thanksgiving Week, I understand how challenging it can be to find gratitude for anything. Earlier in the year, perhaps we were grateful for more time with our families and in our homes. But now, even that gift feels oppressive.

When I find gratitude waning in my life, I always try to both broaden out and narrow down.

What I mean by this is that I try to look around me, for the many blessings I am perhaps missing in the moment. Some of them are broad…like sunsets and moonrises. Others are narrow…like coffee and fresh berries for breakfast.

In every single day —even on the worst day of your life— you have so many things to be grateful for.

My song “Thanks” is the result of this spiritual process. One Thanksgiving season, some years ago now, I wrote a song that tried to capture both the broad and the narrow —the global and the deeply personal— aspects of “giving thanks.” I’ll post the lyrics below as a poem.

And this Thanksgiving Week, even with all that’s gone wrong, I invite you to broaden out and narrow down. Look at both the super big and very small ways in which blessings are all around you, still.

And maybe, even during Thanksgiving 2020, you’ll find a new depth of gratitude in your life too.

“Thanks”

For mountains green with aspen stands,
fluttering like waving hands,
for broad lands…I will give thanks.

For ember orange sunset glow,
purple skies burning low,
the days go…and I will give thanks.

For silver incandescent moons,
every midnight howl and swoon,
real soon…I will give thanks.

For each moment here, each memory clear
For each day I wake, each breath I take
For each pain I bear, each love I share....Thanks.

————

For berry's taste and coffee's smell
rituals we learn so well
that foretell…that I will give thanks.

For lover’s touch and wounds that heal
friends who laugh and think and feel
when it's real…I will give thanks.

For loving those the world rejects
the poor and holy heretics
it connects…that I will give thanks.

For each moment here, each memory clear
For each day I wake, each breath I take
For each pain I bear, each love I share....Thanks.

———-

And is it really all that tough
to believe one word could say enough?

———-

For every blocked and crooked path
every door that closed to fast
for the past…I will give thanks.

For every chance yet to forgive
and every second yet to live
that life gives…I will give thanks.

For times when death comes like a friend
and trusting life can never end
it's well then that I will give thanks.

For each moment here, each memory clear
For each day I wake, each breath I take
For each pain I bear, each love I share....Thanks.

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