Resolve to Rejoice
11-19-21
(2 minutes, 11 seconds)

Hands down, my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.
One family tradition that I especially treasure is right before pie-feasting when we each create our sheet of thanks.
Family and guests alike at our Thanksgiving table are given a blank piece of paper. A pile of colored pencils and markers is scattered from one end of the table to the other for everyone to use. As elaborately or simply as each person chooses, with as much or as little as they would like to write, participants fill out their sheet expressing their heart of thanks and things they are grateful for over the past year.
Then over pie, we share whatever we’d like to from our sheet.

Thanksgiving 2016, I struggled like I never have as I stared at my blank sheet. For one desperately long season I had been confronted head-on with the reality that it’s hard to be thankful and joyful when searing pain is a constant companion and daily life is compromised because of it.
That Thanksgiving week my pain continued to snowball with no resolution in sight. In my bible next to Colossians 2:7, where it says we are to walk in Jesus “abounding in thanksgiving”, I wrote this:
“Struggling to be thankful. November 2016.”

Five years ago and throughout my journey with chronic pain, I’ve been learning the lesson of “Resolve to Rejoice”. It boils down to choosing to peer detective-like through the halls of your life to give thanks even when you simply don’t feel thankful.

In the darkest pit of our suffering, whether physical, relational, emotional, or mental, it may seem like a near-constant battle in the “give thanks war”.
Sometimes we win.
Sometimes we lose.
Sometimes we miserably, flat-out fail. (Been there, done that!)

How do we seek to walk in victory more than defeat in resolving to rejoice?
1. Speak honestly to God
The Psalms are overflowing with honest and brutal questions from the hearts of flailing men.

2. Think deeply about God.
Be preoccupied with who He is and what He has done. And what he says He’ll yet do.

3. Resolve to rejoice in the Lord.
Paul describes himself and his companions as sorrowful yet always rejoicing. 2 Corinthians 6:10
Peter says though grieved by various trials, he and his companions were rejoicing. 1 Peter 1:6
We can resolve to rejoice, though filled with sorrow.

From beginning to end of the day, and for every single breath that constitutes the totality of our lives, God is the source of our strength and ability to rejoice, even in dire circumstances.

In her book Choosing Gratitude, Nancy Leigh DeMoss shared a story that was convicting to my grumpy heart and balm to my weary soul in a season when I felt like giving thanks was more of a sacrificial offering.

She shared the story of Matthew Henry, the eighteenth-century Puritan preacher whose fantastic Bible commentary (1,331 pages and ironically called Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary On the Whole Bible) remains among the most popular commentaries of all time. Matthew Henry was a quiet, thoughtful man who once had the unsettling experience of being robbed. After reflecting on his experience, he wrote in his diary the following:

“Let me be thankful, first, because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life;
third, because although they took my all, it was not much;
and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.”

Someone said, “If you can’t be thankful for what you receive, be thankful for what you have escaped.”

By God’s enabling, let’s give thanks at the beginning, end, and yes, in the very midst of our trials.
Thank God for what He has given.
Thank Him for what He has taken away.
Blessed be the Name of the LORD.