Given Thanks

At some point or another each of our lives will experience the cracking wide open of our heart...some lives begin in such pain, other's will come upon it much later.
But none will escape it.
Because this one life we've been given risks be broken by just merely being alive.

These past few years have brought with them a lot of loss and when my mother passed away, I lost a friend, I lost the one who knew me so well, but there was something reborn in me through her loss.
You see, in her death my Dad somehow came alive, even in his grief.

I have the book he scratched down his thanks in each day. He wrote them down in hope that remembering would somehow re-member his broken heart...and in some ways - it did.
Because there's greater growth, which happens than that which is counted by adding numbers together. There's an increase, which stretches us and expands our heart when healing happens.

It's this memory of my Dad that has me numbering my gratitude lately. I use the small leather note book he once kept track of thanks in and have added my blessings onto his, making his mine now.

This is the love letter I'm writing to God with our words these days.

Dad's number Eleven of thanks, which he wrote on June 20, 2015, just two weeks after my Mom died had me re-reading it and almost in tears today.
'Thankful for God's love and the knowledge he's here with me and will always be no matter how hard it gets...'
It had me shaking my head in agreement as I read it. Because hard days did follow those words, yet God was with him, and he's with me too.This is what counting our blessings does. It agrees within the secret spaces of our soul with the heart of God.

And this my friend, is what has had us reaching for worship this last year. Because worship is the rugged road of giving thanks even when the path is uneven.