Giving Thanks

Each year, as the holiday season approaches, the pace of life inevitably accelerates. Calendars start to fill up and errands pile up. We sometimes feel like we are just running from one thing to the next, with no place to stop and rest.

In our home, Thanksgiving offers needed rest and a welcome break. We pause and remember the ways that we have been blessed by God and we offer thanks and praise to him.

Here are a few traditions that you could consider to help pause and be thankful this Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Jar

(For full details of each of these resources and more, check out the Bring it Home Thanksgiving resources page. Click Here!)

One of the favorite family traditions in our home is our Thankgiving Jar. Each year we have a jar on our table that holds a pen and hundreds of small slips of paper. Every night at dinner, each member of our family is given the opportunity to write somethings that they have been thankful for. It become a wonderful reminder each day to be thankful.

The best part about the thankfulness jar is going through the slips of paper the following Thanksgiving to remember the things that we wrote down the year before. It becomes a wonderful reminder of God's constant grace.

Thanks Pad

This year we have a new resource for keeping track of our families thankfulness. It's called the Thanks Pad. This PDF notebook is FREE to download and is a cute way to store all the thanks that rings in your home during this special holiday.

(Click the Picture)

Thanksgiving Verses

Our most important tradition during Thanksgiving is to pause and meditate on verses that help our family understand how and why we should respond to God in thankfulness.

We read these verses at the dinner table as the food has been set before us to remind us that it is not only the bountiful gifts we have recieved that we should be thankful for, but most importantly we should be thankful for our salvation in Christ (Isaiah 12:1). It is the gospel that makes us sing in thanksgiving (Pslam 69:30). It is the Gospel that gives us hope to be thankful in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18). And it is the God's work of salvation in the Gospel that we will recount for all listening ears. (Psalm 9:1)

For Christians, Thanksgiving is not just a holiday of token thanks, it is a Gospel driven holiday of true thankfulness for the life and blessing we have recieved in Christ.