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4 Thanksgiving Perspectives All Christians Should Have

Happy Thanksgiving week!

Although Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, it creates a wonderful opportunity to talk to our kids about the meaning of gratitude from a biblical perspective. While our secular holiday tends to focus on celebrating lists of things we’re thankful for, the biblical perspective on gratitude is much richer in meaning.

Here are 4 “thanksgiving” perspectives all Christians should have. This weekend is a great time to consider any one of these as a meaningful conversation starter!

1. Christian gratitude is directed to God exclusively.

In a secular sense, the phrase “I’m so grateful that…” is simply the expression of a positive feeling without an acknowledgment of where the blessing originates.

For a Christian, God should always be acknowledged as the source of all we have.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.” (James 1:17)

Conversation starter: Ask your kids to try to come up with something that DOESN’T come from God. They usually come up with physical things like tables, couches, TVs, etc. Use it as an opportunity to brainstorm all the ways God still provided the earthly material and human knowledge needed to create these things.

2. Christian gratitude is independent of circumstances.

It’s really easy and quite natural to be grateful when everything is going great. But a grateful response to positive circumstances is only half of the story. Christians are expected to respond with gratitude to everything that happens.

“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

Conversation starter: Ask your kids why we should be able to thank God during difficult times. A couple of key talking points include: 1) Our salvation remains assured regardless of earthly circumstances and 2) we know that God will ultimately work all things together for good (Romans 8:28).

3. Christian gratitude is a worldview, not a matter of etiquette.

Saying “thank you” has become such a routine reaction in our culture that it’s often an expression of etiquette rather than genuine gratitude. Unfortunately, this can extend to our prayer lives if our gratitude amounts to little more than a polite prayer list of acknowledgments for things going well.

Christian gratitude is a worldview, not spiritual etiquette.

“And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Colossians 3:17)

Conversation Starter: Ask your kids how today would have been different if they lived gratefully at all times (e.g., perhaps they would have been less mad at a friend if they were more grateful for that friendship). How is living gratefully different than simply listing things we’re thankful for in prayer?

4. Christian gratitude, at its heart, is a response to God’s grace.

In a Thanksgiving sermon from several years ago, Pastor John Piper spoke of the relationship between grace and gratitude in 2 Corinthians 4:15. The Apostle Paul wrote:

“It is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.”

Piper pointed out that you don’t feel much gratitude when you receive a paycheck because you gave your work in exchange. Gratitude generally rises in proportion to how undeserved a gift is. This verse explicitly connects the knowledge of grace – our undeserved gift from God – with the natural outcome of gratitude.

As Piper says beautifully, “Gratitude flourishes in the sphere of grace.”

Indeed. This Thanksgiving, pray that God would overwhelm you with a profound sense of His grace. Your gratitude will flourish in response.

What other “thanksgiving” perspectives do you think Christians should have?

Best of Christian Mom Thoughts: 15 Favorite Posts

It was a year ago this week that I started this blog! Thank you so much for reading. Every time you leave a comment, click like or share, or send me an email, it means a lot to me! It has been a huge blessing to write here and I hope that some of the posts have blessed you as well.

As I write this, our house has been decimated by the flu. In celebration of this blog-iversary, and in attempt to avoid writing an original post when I can’t sit up, I wanted to share links to 15 “best of” posts you may have missed over the year. Some of these are the most shared posts by readers and some are simply posts I personally enjoyed writing the most.

One quick thing before the list…If you enjoy reading my blog and aren’t yet an email subscriber, would you consider signing up to get my posts via email? Just enter your email address in the box to the right and click the link in the email you’ll receive to activate. You can unsubscribe at any time and you’ll only receive an email when I post (1-2 times per week).

Here is why I’m asking: Facebook has been making a lot of changes that make it less and less likely that you’ll see updates from pages you’ve “liked” in your news feed. Many of you who are Facebook fans have only been seeing my posts because I’ve paid to promote them in my fans’ feeds. (Go check out the link you clicked from – if it says “promoted” at the bottom, you wouldn’t have seen this post if I didn’t pay for it.) I’m not going to continue promoting Facebook links regularly, so if you want to know when there is a new blog post, please do subscribe via email. Thank you!

Without further ado, here are 15 posts you may have missed that I think you’ll enjoy (from oldest to newest). Continue reading

A Simple Project: Transform Gratitude into Action

Each night before bed our family does a roundtable prayer of thanks, with each of us saying something we are grateful for. Every time we do this, a small wave of guilt passes over me. I know we are supposed to give thanks to God for all things, but there is something that feels privileged about thanking God for all that is good and then placing our contented heads on our pillows to rest before another blessed day.

I’ve spent a lot of time making sure my kids feel grateful. I guess what bothers me is that feeling grateful has resulted in…just feeling grateful. I would like our gratitude to result in action. As our pastor always says, we are “blessed to be a blessing.”

This November, make gratitude more about being a blessing than about passively acknowledging we are blessed.

Here’s a simple idea to make that happen! Gather your family to make a list of five things they are grateful for. Then brainstorm how to transform that gratitude into related action. You may or may not have time to accomplish it all in November, but just set a goal for however long your things will take. Here is an example from what we are doing: Continue reading

Will Your Kids Become Undecided Voters?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released a report on the religious affiliations of Americans. Their comprehensive analysis drew on surveys of 17,000 adults. What they found has been making headlines everywhere:

One in five adults now have no religious affiliation, with 13.9% of the population saying they believe in “nothing in particular.”

That’s 33 million people who are, for all intents and purposes, “undecided” about their faith. This group has grown by 20% in the last five years alone.

It’s important to note that these people aren’t atheist or agnostics, who were tallied separately. Atheists have decided they don’t believe in God. Agnostics have decided that it’s not possible to know about God. Those who believe in “nothing in particular” have only decided to be undecided.

USA Today featured a quote from a member of the “nothing in particular” group. Rebecca Cardone, the student body president at California Lutheran University, said:

“I like the ambiguity of going without a label,” she says. “I prefer to stress the importance of acting with compassion rather than choosing a predetermined system of beliefs.”

Why should you care that more and more people are of Ms. Cardone’s mentality?

Three-fourths of this group were brought up in a religious tradition – mostly Protestant. They had parents just like me and you, who told them about Jesus, took them to church, and raised them in faith.

They didn’t switch religions; they just stopped caring. They came to believe that there is more joy in being undecided than fulfillment in being committed.

How does that happen? I think we can learn a lot about the premises that lead young people to a perpetual state of believing in “nothing in particular” by breaking down Ms. Cardone’s quote.

As Christian parents, we need to be aware of these premises and work to intentionally educate our kids on why they are false.Continue reading

Review: A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans is a popular Christian blogger (http://rachelheldevans.com) whose new book, “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” was released today. I was given a pre-release copy by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

One thing I will never be accused of is being a feminist.

I read a news story today about a major university removing the word “freshman” from all documents to adopt more “gender inclusive language.” My eyes can’t roll far enough back into my head when I hear something like that.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve never felt victimized by my gender. I can honestly say I’ve never felt any disadvantage in being a woman, and I’ve never gone to a church where gender roles were prominently discussed.

When I received Rachel Held Evans’ new book, “A Year of Biblical Womanhood,” however, my eyes were opened to just how much Christian gender controversy I’ve been oblivious to. In the book, Evans explores what the widespread concept of “biblical womanhood” really is through a one-year experiment to live as literally as possible according to the passages about women in the Bible.

What Kind of Parents Did Your Kids Get Stuck With?

Before you had kids, you probably had a pretty good idea of what kind of parent you didn’t want to be. After all, it’s the negative things we see in public that grab our attention and make us smugly develop an internal checklist of “parental traits I will not have.” I had a list a mile long.

Now that I have kids, this checklist continues to build, but in a different way. It’s no longer about what I won’t do in the future, but about whether I’m rising above the perceived parental infraction now. If I’m honest, other people’s failures subconsciously become a benchmark against which I determine that I’m doing OK.

I was at Target the other day and saw a mom pushing a cart with three kids. Every single kid was trying to get their mom’s attention but the mom was wearing an iPod and was completely oblivious to what her kids needed. She actually ran over her kid’s foot because she was so out to lunch. I immediately had a judgmental thought toward the mom, masquerading as sympathy for the kids: “Those poor kids. They got stuck with a mom like that.”

For some reason, the word “stuck” kept creeping into my thoughts after that day. When I see someone doing something negative that I personally wouldn’t do, I label the kids as “stuck” with a bad parent overall. When I personally fail, I consider that failure in isolation. But my kids are just as “stuck” with me as that mom’s kids were stuck with her.

My kids are stuck with a mom who is a perfectionist, is impatient, is often overly rigid, is easily frustrated and is not a nurturer by nature.

Stuck. They can’t get rid of those traits in their environment because I can’t get rid of them. They are – and I am – stuck with my sin nature.Continue reading

What Does It Mean to Really Love God?

(This is one of the “60 Faith Questions I Hope to Answer Before My Kids Leave Home.” I’m going to be answering several of them over time. This is the first post in the series.)

I love fall.

Golden leaves, pumpkins, haystacks and apples give me warm fuzzies. Every year I decorate our home for Fall as soon as Labor Day is over. Out pop my orange and black pumpkin slippers. Things like pumpkin spice coffee appear on my shopping list without a second thought. Last week I even started my first Pinterest board: “Recipes for Fall.”

In the midst of my little Fall utopia, I had a deep, scary thought last week: What if I don’t really love God? After all, my first Pinterest board was dedicated to fall recipes, not to God. I don’t have slippers with crosses, and I currently have far more pumpkins in my house than decorative reminders of faith. Is it possible that I’m more passionate about something as simple as Fall than I am about God?

If there is anything I learned from years of childhood Sunday School, it was that I’m supposed to love God. I don’t recall anyone ever explaining what it would mean, however, to love a Being whom I can’t experience like anything or anyone else on earth. I, like most people, was therefore left to apply my earthly understanding of love to how I should relate to God.

When we love earthly things or other humans, that love is primarily based on intensity of feeling. I will humbly admit that I don’t always feel intensely about God. In fact, in times when I’m feeling particularly mild about God, I start having doubts. I assume those dampened feelings point to a problem with God even though it is only my feelings that change, not Him.

But is that what love for God is all about? Maintaining intense, warm fuzzies? I had to do a little Bible study on the topic.Continue reading

16 Ways to Make Your Home More Peaceful

My family is a family of intense people. We are all high strung, type-A, I-must-have-my-life-planned-to-the-nano-second-or-else-I-feel-totally-out-of-control kinds of people.

There’s no doubt we are at least partially wired this way from birth. It’s like my kids came out of the womb freshly bathed in this personality type. Then we’ve wrapped them in a towel of type-A environment, and voila! We have a house of intense people.

Intensity itself isn’t necessarily bad, but when intensity manifests itself in negative ways that lead to a less peaceful home, it creates a barrier to Christian living. Negative intensity masks the opportunities for spiritual development.

I’d like to bring our family’s collective intensity down a bit, so I’ve been looking for ways to make our home more peaceful. Here are 16 things you can consider for your own home that are making a peaceful difference in ours!

Announcing Online Small Groups for Christian Moms!

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN OLD POST AND WE ARE NO LONGER DOING ONLINE SMALL GROUPS. THANK YOU.

Next month will mark the one-year anniversary of Christian Mom Thoughts! When I started my blog, I never would have guessed that there would be more than 3,800 readers between Facebook, email and RSS a year later. It has been an incredible blessing to me to write Christian Mom Thoughts and I pray that you have been blessed by these posts in some small way as well.

As I’ve considered my vision for the blog in the next year, the number one thing on my heart is finding a way to connect the readers of this blog – all of the wonderful parents out there who have connected to Christian Mom Thoughts because you share the desire to build a more Christ-centered home. I would love to get to know more of you, and for you to know each other!

It’s not easy to “connect” to others through a blog. Sure, you can leave a comment (and I love when you do!), but it’s not really a way to connect to each other. Sure, you can say something on Facebook (and, again, I love when you do!), but Facebook isn’t the best place either to share your private struggles, develop new friendships and seek accountability in your Christian parenting efforts.

That’s why I’m starting a place on my site for online “small groups.” If you aren’t familiar with the concept of small groups from your own church, the idea is that you express your interest, get assigned to a group, and develop a meaningful relationship with fellow Christians who support each other in their walk with the Lord.Continue reading

Teachable Moment: When Your Kids Say “It’s Not Fair”

I’m really terrible about cleaning up the table after a meal. Plates and cups usually sit there until the next meal, when I clean everything up in order to put the next set of plates and cups down.

Last week we were out all day, so when we came home for dinner, everything was still on the table from breakfast. Kenna sat down in her seat before dinner was ready and went to drink the water that had been there since breakfast.

Without giving it adequate thought I said, “Wait! Let me get you some ‘fresh’ water.”

Big mistake.

The next day, I handed Kenna her water bottle after it had sat out for about an hour. She started walking to the kitchen.

“Mommy, I’m going to dump this out so I can get FRESH water.”

Regret ran a mile deep at that moment, realizing I had inadvertently entered the notion in her head that she was entitled to waste water that wasn’t freshly poured. I told her not to dump it. A meltdown ensued.

“MOMMY! That’s not FAIR! It’s not FAIR that I don’t have fresh water!” Continue reading