Thanksgiving......and the love dare

When was the last time you made a list of things you love? 

This Thanksgiving season, I challenge you to the love dare.  

Take a few moments and begin your list.....write down all the things you love....write and write and hopefully your list is too long and you can't fit it all in one sitting and it keeps growing and bursts and overflows till your words somersault off the bottom of the page in exuberant celebration of all things precious and meaningful and hilarious and glorious and beautiful and magical and loved by you.

Write the huge things.  Write the minuscule things.  Just write.   

pages of things of I love in journals past

Add details or write single words.  If you get stuck, look around.  Look inside and outside. List your favourite smells, sounds, feels, touches, tastes. Look at the people in your life, past and present.  Look up and down. 

But whatever you do, watch and look and search and seek to notice the countless things you love.

And then re-read your list and pay close attention -- notice that you are actually reading that ways that God loves you, the ways He pours his soul-filling beauty into your life.

THANKSGIVING. GRATITUDE. SOUL MEDICINE.

Counting the ways you are loved.

And for those of you who, like me, struggle with an aching, just-below-the-surface feeling that an apology should follow our "love list" because we have so much to be thankful for, please consider Ann Voskamp's words in her book one thousand gifts.  She admits what, at first glance, might seem offensive:

"to focus the lens of a heart on the minute, in a world mangled and maimed and desperately empty." 

But then she continues:

"I have lived pain and my life can tell:  I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the sound of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.  Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us?  Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering.  The converse does.  The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.  When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows.  How can this not be the best thing for the world?  For us?  The clouds open when we mouth thanks."  (p. 58)(emphasis added)

SO HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO YOU ALL - AND LET THE LOVE DARE BEGIN.