Being grateful is always a choice. It may mean sorting through what you thought should happen in your life and looking for and finding things to be grateful for.
The way it is.
My life isn’t terrible. I’m a lot better off than lots of people.
I have two older vehicles, a small (barely worth mentioning) amount in the bank, my kids are healthy (if not slightly cantankerous and lively), and I live in a warm house.
Not bad. But the truth is that if you had told me fifteen or twenty years ago that I would be a single mom, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I had it all planned out. I’m a reasonably careful person. I follow the rules.
I would have been devastated to learn I would be a middle-aged woman with a messy life.
And I have to admit that gratefulness can be difficult. It requires me to accept the hard things that have happened in life, and it requires me to think about life differently.
We all have to accept life as is.
I’ve known some single moms who could never accept their new reality.
They spend their years in misery and sulking. They are unwilling or unable to acknowledge that they have a new life.
And they are most certainly not grateful for their new life.
Life rarely goes the way most people plan it out. And herein lies their choice.
Amy Charmichael once said, “That in acceptance, lieth peace.”
I may not like my new reality, but accepting where I am now is one step closer to peace and gratefulness.
We must also acknowledge that God’s way of thinking differs from ours.
We are limited in vision, but God’s way of thinking is much higher than ours.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
We tend to put God in a box. Unable to accept that God can give great gifts to us in the situation we are in now.
But truthfully, some of my greatest blessings have come at my darkest times.
It’s almost impossible to understand how he can come on the darkest night and place hope in a broken, tired heart.
I cannot say that I always agree with him. But I can say that he shows up. And he gave me not only what I needed but also what I didn’t even know I needed.
We must accept that while our plans may not work out, God can still bring goodness.
I’ve heard somewhere that we may not always get to choose what is happening to us, but we can decide where to look.
We may not have chosen to be single moms. But we can choose how we will respond and live our lives.
Being a single mom is hard. But if we accept where we are, know God can work in our circumstances, and choose to be grateful, we can live lives of hope and happiness.
And we can teach our kids that even though life doesn’t always work out as we think it should, they can choose hope and joy.
