In honor of Thanksgiving, today during my children’s ministry program instead of a traditional check-in, I asked each child to share what they were thankful for. The answers that the kids gave brought me inspiration throughout my day. Most children were thankful for their parents, their brothers and sisters, and their friends. Obviously very important people to be thankful for. Afterall these are some of the most important people in our lives, and they are the ones that love and nurture us. I thought the most interesting answers came from a little boy in my class. He spoke his name, and then quietly said he was thankful for god. I continued with my class, but I was pretty blown away by his response.
When I shared what I was thankful for with my family this year, I came up with a myriad of responses. I’m thankful for my family, my friends, the chance to study at BU, my job at Marsh Chapel, my fellow Unitarian Universalists who love and support me, and even my cats. I came up with people, and moments, and opportunities that overwhelmed me with gratitude, but I didn’t think to be thankful for god. Looking at it in a round about way, the gratitude I expressed for the people, places and communities that hold me is sort of being thankful for god, because I believe that the spark of the divine, the spirit of life is within and among those people and communites. However, it surprised me that a little child could so easily come up with an answer that didn’t ever cross my mind.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about my changing god beliefs. I’m beginning to become more comfortable with the idea of a loving, divine force in the universe that resides within and around all things. Even with my new understandings of god, being thankful for god is a bit of a foreign concept. I’ve been pondering what a thankfulness for god could actually look like. My current ideas are that this kind of thankfulness might require more prayer and more service. Both are good, and are things I want to incorporate into my daily life, but neither of them were things I thought would stem from gratitude. Prayer seemed to me like something people did when they needed things, not when they were thankful. And service is something I do, because I care about other people. I look forward to practicing both of these as an extension of thankfulness for god. The words of a tiny little boy in my children’s ministry class have given me an entirely new prospective on gratitude, and that’s something to be thankful for.