I don’t know about you, but I may need to get off social media for a few days. This time around my social media “fast” is not to help grow my spiritual life a bit more, but to grow my waistline a bit less. 

My Instagram feed is dangerously tempting with pictures of turkeys and pumpkin pies. There are tips and tricks on how to get your bird more juicy than the latest gossip in town. There are twists on Thanksgiving menus—although I’m pretty sure vegan shepherd’s pie won’t go down as a Turkey Day classic. There are charcuterie boards that look like they hold an entire country’s annual supply of cheese and crackers.

But what may be missing from social media and maybe from our lives this Thanksgiving is thanks.

Maybe you don’t feel very thankful this year. It hasn’t just been “one of those days.” It’s been “one of those years.”

Maybe you’re overwhelmed by the lemons life has thrown your way. You tried to make lemonade, but found that you need loads of sugar to make it remotely palatable—and that sugar throws your diet off and so you might as well just grumble about the lemons instead of whining about your weight gain.

To be thankful just because it’s Thanksgiving may seem awkward, manufactured, and fake.

But thankfulness in Scripture doesn’t seem optional.

There are repeated commands—and not merely suggestions—to give thanks. Here’s one:

Give thanks in everything for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

Friend, here’s what I meant by my admittedly click-baitey title, “Don’t Give Thanks For Everything,” — we are called to give thanks IN all our circumstances, not necessarily FOR all our circumstances.

What does that mean? Is it just semantics? Is it merely wordplay? I don’t believe so.

If, for instance, you are dealing with a chronic health condition, I don’t believe that God necessarily wants you to fake joy and thank Him FOR that particular illness. Yet, IN the midst of the pain, you can thank for Who He is and how He provides. He is sovereign, He is with you, He is compassionate, He is the healer, His eyes are on you, He brings people to help you, He gives doctors the wisdom to treat you… those are things we can be truly thankful for even in the hard times.

A couple of years ago, a performer on America’s Got Talent won the hearts of millions. Her stage name was Nightbirde. She was a wisp of a woman, battered by cancer which had returned three times. She had a 2 percent chance of survival. Life had thrown the most menacing lemons at her, the likes of which I know nothing about. And yet when she came on stage, she radiated a quiet joy in Jesus. Her words to AGT judge Simon Cowell still get me: “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”

Friends, hard and happy can walk together.  Gratitude to the Lord can co-exist with grief. Thankfulness can rub shoulders with trauma. Praise can hold hands with pain.

We are not called to thank God FOR the trauma, or the pain, or the grief. But we thank God for who He is to us IN the midst of the hard. 

That’s what Scripture calls a “sacrifice of praise.” (Hebrews 13: 15). It wouldn’t be a ‘sacrifice’ unless there was something we were laying on the altar. 

That posture won’t transform our situations. But it will transform our hearts. Here’s what I’ve discovered: When we take the opportunity to give thanks, we discover more and more things to be grateful for. 

This Thanksgiving, you can skip the turkey and go with tofu if that’s your thing. Or maybe you’ll pass on the mashed potatoes. Perhaps you’ll hold back from the pecan pie.

I hope you don’t say no to any of those things (Well, the green beans are optional, in my book).

 But I pray that you don’t scrimp on thanks to the Lord because things are hard.

Don’t give thanks for everything. Give thanks in everything.  

Give Him your “sacrifice of praise.”

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