I've heard it said, "Be kind to everyone, for everyone is in a great battle."  This year brings this ancient quote to mind for so many I love; so many I care about; so many that matter to me are in an uphill season of their journey. The way is steep and the journey is arduous.So how do we turn our hearts to be grateful in such a time as this?  My son will be deployed again in a few days to a war---yes, a war where real sons die everyday and real daughters never come home. Yet, I am grateful for his courage; his willingness; his resolve to be my defender--your defender.This past year, we have walked with many who have received disturbing and unsettling diagnosis about their bodies as well as their emotional conditions. How can we be thankful when disease and death rob us of those we love so deeply? How can we express gratitude when illness, be it mental or physical makes people walk with a limp so crooked that they may never walk straight again?  We can be humble in our words this Thanksgiving and recognize that any life--no matter how damaged or spent matters.  We can give thanks for the years we have spent with loved ones who have given us joy though now they sow only the seeds of strife and hard times. We can be thankful to realize that an illness does not, in the end, define a person. A person who is stricken with an illness is still the Beloved of God and this, in the end is what really matters.These are hard times for many of us regarding our money and the lack of it. It's our toughest year in ministry. We are significantly down in our support. It causes great concern because you wonder how you can go on building into the future when the sand that you are standing on seems to shift at the slightest ebb of the tide.  What matters is this:  God knows. God cares and we are all in the hands of the Potter.  We simply open our hands to receive what He gives and this, in the end, makes us thankful when we realize that for far too long, we have taken advantage of the generosity of our Heavenly Father. Thank you God for our daily bread. We trust you for tomorrows!Many  I know are feeling alone. Not anchored to a stable community, we feel like there is an aloneness which is larger than our sense of community. Do people really care?  Will the church ever wake up from it's long winter's nap and offer us what Jesus intended all along--a place to belong.  Last night, I held hands with a few folks and we made a circle.  Every circle we stand in is a visible symbol that we are not alone. I am thankful that I am not alone---that there is a circle of friends both in heaven and on earth that stand with me even now.  I am thankful for Lord Byron's words he penned hundreds of years ago when he wrote, "In solitude, where I am least alone."  The gift of solitude shapes our hearts to realize that we are never alone. That across the threshold of aloneness is Jesus himself. I am so thankful for this.For families that feel so fragile.... I am your brother here. My own family feels so fragile. My Mom is in congestive heart failure and her days seem short not long to me. There is tension sometimes and exhaustion at other times.  Yet there are the memories of love, happiness and contentment that feed my soul and help me to realize that "There is a time for everything" and that no time last forever--not even this time of feeling like we are but dancing on thin ice and we can hear the cracking all around us.  Let us at this Thanksgiving turn our hearts toward our brother, Jesus and our father God and rest in the fact that we are family with the Trinity and in that family there is no end to the joy we will one day relish at the big, thanksgiving banquet that will go on and on and on.Let us be reminded that the very first Thanksgiving was one full of paradox. The pilgrims found themselves in a frigid, frozen new world, yet their hearts were filled with hope.... by this time next year, life will be better. By this time next year, we will again, see God's faithfulness. By this time, next year, we will have overcome a year that might have been hard--perhaps the hardest we have endured, but this will cause us to bow our heads and pause in this hurry sick world and say today, "Now thank we all our God, with hearts and hands and voices."Thanksgiving Blessings 2012Steve and Gwen SmithPotter's Inn