Our family has been through a lot the last few years.  I just got back last night from a funeral in Wisconsin for my Grandpa’s brother.  It’s been a long couple of days.  Attending funerals is like an out-of-body experience now.  It’s like traveling back 4 yrs and I’m sitting in the front row at my parents service, numb and silent.  Did you know that 80% of memorial services use the same readings, scriptures, and songs.  At least 80% of the one’s I’ve attended in the last 4 yrs have.  It’s like reliving the same service over and over again.

But today is Thankful on a Thursday and one thing I have learned is that surviving tragedy makes being thankful so much more meaningful.  One of my favorite quotes is by Horace Mann (an American educator and abolitionist from the early 1800’s)…

“In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle.  He who has never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind speak of color.”

It’s one thing to see a rainbow from the porch.

It’s another thing to stand dripping in the field and feel the sun come out and start steam-drying your clothes and frizzing your hair while you watch the heavens open up and send soft, hazy purple, red, green, and yellow promises straight from God arching down to meet you and lift your weary, gray spirit up out of the mud you find yourself standing in.

“And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” Genesis 9:16

At our farm, 2008

I am thankful that God has a plan.  Even when I don’t.  Maybe especially when I don’t…

“For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord…” Jeremiah 29:11.

I am thankful that it’s a good plan…

“…thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end…” Jeremiah 29:11.

And I am thankful that I’m not alone in facing whatever future that plan holds for me…

“…and, lo, I am with you always.  Even unto the end of the world.” Matthew 28:20.