Thanksgiving

First and foremost Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. This blog will not have pictures or links but I want to take the time to say a small amount of the things that I am thankful for and I hope that you will take the time to read it. I was especially reminded of everything that I have to be thankful for this year. First and foremost it was my roommates, and not only the ones that are here with me now. Having them with me has definitely made this trip exponentially better than it would have been had I made it by myself. Them being here has also reminded me how blessed I am to have four amazing Christian men as living partners. I can not even express how thankful I am for them in this blog but do hope that each day I do something to show them how appreciative I am of them. Secondly, I am so thankful for my parents. I get a chance to see everyday, even at school, how much my parents and sibling (and siblings-in-law :) ) love and care for me but coming home I get a very special opportunity to see it first-hand. The depth and kind of love that my parents have and exhibit for and towards me is something that I probably will never understand but someday hopefully get to excperience in some way with kids of my own. The sacrifices they make for me on a daily basis truly amaze me and I hope that they see me as being appreciative and not taking that for granted. I also hope that I am doing things to make their hearts swell and give them a way of seeing my apprecitation in a tangible way. Thirdly I am thankful for my friends. The friends I have here at home, the friends I have back in California, and the friends that have been with me through almost every year of my life to this point. I got more than the amount of thanksgiving wishes from all aformentioned kinds of friends than anyone would ever deserve and it got me thinking, "I am so blessed to be surrounded by such encouraging, uplifting, loving people that care for me. I did nothing to deserve this, am I living in a way that shows them my appreciation and serving them the best way that I can to reciprocate my love for them?" (do you guys see a common theme in my thoughts today?) We spent thanksgiving with a family that mine has been very close with since I was in kindergarten. They became a second family to me in a way that would take too many pages to describe. Their son Patrick and I have been best friends since then and virtually inseperable. We have gone our seperate ways now as he goes to school in North Carolina and I on the opposite side of the country in California. Our families and we have remianed close friends however and were fortunate enough to spend the holiday together today. I was considering all the things that they have done for me in the past years of my life and things that they are continuing to do for me, and realized, there is no way I could ever repay or convey anywhere close to the type of gratitude that I would like to and they deserve. Even more, they wouldnt want me to repay them in any way. Again, with no surprise to anyone, I considered if I am living in a way that is expressing my gratitude. When I consider all these things and wonder and fret about how important it is to live in a way that shows my gratitude, I question how often I live my life in a way that shows Christ I am grateful for what he has done and continues to do through his Holy Spirit. If my blog had a little emoticon at the top that was telling everyone how I felt at this given moment, mine would say "thankful". I'm not talking about the cliche thankful that everyone puts up just because its Thanksgiving. I'm talking about the thankful that causes me not to say thanks but to live gracefully and gratefully. Are you thankful?

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy