This piece was written for our church’s November newsletter, Grace & Peace.
When I was a little girl, I remember something Corrie ten Boom said that stayed with me:
“When people come up and give me a compliment… I take each remark as if it were a flower. At the end of the day I lift up the bouquet of flowers I have gathered throughout the day and say, ‘Here you are, Lord, it is all Yours.'”
I remember trying to practice this myself in bed at night, collecting all the good things of the day like wildflowers from the field. I would put my fists together, then lift them toward the ceiling of my dark bedroom. Of course, I probably only remembered to do it once or twice. Thanksgiving, as we all know, is a discipline that too often gets trampled by busyness, laziness, or just the drowsiness that falls over us at the end of the day.
Later, when I was a teenager, one of my friends gave me a thanksgiving journal and encouraged me to write in it every day. For several years, I did, and that journal became a big bouquet of unexpected little gifts: frost on the window, coffee on a cold morning, a bird on the sill, flag football with my nephews, thunder, coyote calls, homemade bread.
Corrie’s practice is a beautiful one, because it penetrates to the heart of the matter—that giving lies within thanksgiving. When we give thanks, we are simply returning to God what was already His, like a child who picks a flower from her momma’s garden to give back to her. In the language of the Psalms, we are ascribing to the LORD the glory due His name (Ps. 29:2).
The glory already belongs to Him; we are simply returning to Him what He already owns in abundance. He tends every bird of the field and farms the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps. 50:10-11).
What Paul asked the Corinthians we must ask ourselves: “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7)
“What do you have that you did not receive?” – 1 Cor. 4:7
And so thanksgiving is a practice at both ends: to gather what we’re given, then give it back to God. This includes every beautiful marigold and chrysanthemum—but as Corrie ten Boom well knew, it includes the thorns and thistles, too.
bethanyjlincks.com 
Wonderful. ❤
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