Rails from the Rails # 8 - Thankfulness

Rails from the Rails – Eight (originally posted on October 16, 2007 at www.argonauts.ca)

All Aboard: There Before most meals, my wife and I ask our children if any of them would like to say grace. Usually 2 or 3 of them race to raise their hands so they are chosen to give thanks. The prayers that follow are usually very sincere and often quite humorous. The children routinely forget to give thanks for the meal we are about to eat while they give thanks for almost anything else they can think of. As parents, one of the reasons we encourage our children to participate in saying grace is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. We have much to be thankful for. Our pre-meal routine is one way we can instill thankfulness.

Tickets Please: Having just spent a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with my family, I thought I would write about thankfulness. I mentioned above that we try and say grace before meals regularly. It is a way for our family to give thanks to God for the many wonderful things we have in our lives. The word “grace”, when used to denote a pre-meal prayer, comes from the Latin word gratia which means thankfulness or to give thanks. So the prayer before meals giving thanks has been aptly called grace.
As with most traditions or rituals, they can become a meaningless endeavour if we do not participate in them purposefully and intelligently. As a result, we encourage the kids to think and then to thank. They continually open my eyes to the many things that we have to be thankful for: pets and playmates, family and food, safety and sanity, football and the future. This thankfulness displayed by the young ones reminds me of a quote by G. K. Chesterton: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” During this Thanksgiving season we have much to be thankful for!
Gratitude is like a barometer. Our level of thankfulness can give us a good idea of how much “pressure” we are under. But it does not just indicate “pressure”; it can release it as well. When we come under the pressure and stress of difficulties, disappointments, and drudgery of daily life, it is easy to feel sorry for ourselves and even become embittered. But taking time to be thankful, even in tough times, alleviates the pressure and stress and gives us a new perspective on our lives and how good we have it.
My family was preparing for a wonderful and rare occasion: all of my siblings and their spouses and children were going to be in the same place at the same time. The roll call would be as follows with my siblings in bold: Ray and Meaghan with their children Robbie, Noah, and Molly; Mike and Heidi with their children Maleah, Michaelah, Malachi and Micah; Jon and Bryar with their children Jacob, Jesse, and Sparrow; Kevin and Kylie with their children Kayden, Mekhi and Jayla; Nicole and myself with Ena, Adele, Mara, Judah and Arwen. And to really gild the lily my mother, step-dad and grandmother would also be in attendance. I hope you can appreciate the difficulty in arranging everyone’s presence at the festivities. It has not happened with this entire group…ever. We were looking forward to the food, the fellowship and the fun of this Thanksgiving Day. As it turned out, some sickness prevented this reunion. Bryar’s children became sick and she and her husband made the tough choice to return home. They did not want to risk passing the bug to others and would have their hands full with caring for their own children. Though this was disappointing for us all, we chose to be thankful on Thanksgiving Day and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. That is the thing about thankfulness and gratitude - it is a choice. We can choose to see things in our lives from different perspectives. We can find things to be thankful for or we can find things to complain about. I definitely need more thankfulness in my life and if I take a moment to contemplate the list of blessings in my life, I quickly realize that I could not easily exhaust that list.

Last Stop: "In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich."
- Dietrick Bonhoeffer