A week after Thanksgiving, I am feeling a need to be thankful. Since I feel like being the opposite, here is an attempt at gratitude. I am thankful because:
- I am leaving in two weeks.
- God is sovereign.
- I am sometimes outside in the hours between 10 and 4, so I see at least some daylight, though it is not sunlight.
- I have found a surrogate church family that is the one thing I will be wholly sorry to leave. I am loved and accepted by people so different from me, though I am only here for a little while and butcher their language every time I talk to them.
- Megan Paysnoe also came to Russia this semester.
- I have tickets to go see Ukraine and the Caucasus and my family in a matter of days, and to see Norman and my community in a matter of weeks.
- I have my family and my community, though they are not here with me.
- I have a bed and food and a roof over my head, whatever the other details concerning those may be.
- I am healthy.
- I have at least limited access to the internet.
- The internet actually exists to connect where previously was disconnection.
- I am experiencing another culture, and seeing some pretty cool cities.
- I actually have all those layers of clothes which I need to keep me warm.
- I can ride a bike and drive a car and cook for myself and live in a house with friends when I get back to the US.
- I have cool Christmas presents waiting for my family!
- I have access to the 18 books and 65 sermons which I have read and listened to in the last three months.
- I have a blog for venting.
Heavenly Father, if I should suffer need, and go unclothed, and be in poverty, make my heart prize thy love, know it, be constrained by it, though I be denied all blessings.
It is thy mercy to afflict and try me with wants, for by these trials I see my sins, and desire severance from them.
Let me willingly accept misery, sorrows, temptations, if I can thereby feel sin as the greatest evil, and be delivered from it with gratitude to thee, acknowledging this as the highest testimony of they love.
When thy Son, Jesus, came into my soul instead of sin he became more dear to me than sin formerly had been; his kindly rule replaced sin's tyranny.
Teach me to believe that if ever I would have any sin subdued I must not only labour to overcome it, but must invite Christ to abide in place of it, and he must become to me more than vile lust had been; that his sweetness, power, life may be there.
Thus I must seek a grace from him contrary to sin, but must not claim it apart from himself.
When I am afraid of evils to come, comfort me by showing me that in myself I am a dying, condemned wretch, but in Christ I am reconciled and live; that in myself I find insufficiency and no rest, but in Christ there is satisfaction and peace; that in myself I am feeble and unable to do good, but in Christ I have ability to do all things.
Though now I have his graces in part, I shall shortly have them perfectly in that state where thou wilt show thyself fully reconciled, and alone sufficient, efficient, loving me completely, with sin abolished.
O Lord, hasten that day.
- "Contentment," from Valley of Vision
