Thank-FULL

**This was originally written and posted in May 2008.  It's a favorite of mine I thought I'd share again.  : ) **

Last weekend we went to Cambria (on the coast of California, a couple of hours away from where we live). And God taught me a lesson about thankfulness. On Saturday afternoon we went to the beach. I had this big plan to build a big sandcastle. We had buckets, shovels… we were set! Except the beach we went to didn’t have great sandcastle-building sand like I remembered. It had pebbles. Lots and lots and lots of pebbles and a little bit of sand. And once we got there and we discovered that Lowell was right and I was wrong, we couldn’t just go somewhere else, because we were waiting for Lowell's brother and his family to meet us there and we didn’t have cell service.

We sat down and tried to build a castle with the little bit of sand that was there, but it collapsed. So we just played in the pebbles and dug holes and fed and chased sea gulls and searched for “gems”. Mikaela had quite a beautiful collection of pretty rocks (her "gems") and by the end of our time there, we were all hunting with her. Well, in the middle of my gem hunting, I found a real treasure: thankfulness.

About a week ago, I was asking God about my tendency toward regret & disappointment. For example, I was really sad when I found out we could have sent Timothy a camera and other gifts when he was referred to us. I wished we had known and was in a small way grieving the loss of pictures we could have had if we had sent something earlier. But God showed me (as I pondered the regret issue) that a big part of the solution is TRUST. I needed to trust Him that it was fine and maybe even good (for whatever reasons) that we hadn’t sent anything before. If it hadn’t been fine or good, He would have done something about it. So I could trust Him, grieve what we had missed and move on.

That day at the beach, after we had been there a while having a very nice time, I was still wishing I would have remembered the beach wasn’t sandy so we could have gone somewhere else. Then God opened my eyes. Toby and Lowell were having fun trying to get the waves to make water go into a hole they had dug. And Mikaela was in paradise!!!!! She loves pretty little things as much as anything in the world and she was surrounded by them! And they were free! And she could collect as many as she wanted! And her mom was helping! And I was on the beach, listening to and watching the waves (one of my favorite things in the world to do). What in the world was I doing still wishing for something else? And that’s where I discovered thankfulness. When I stopped wishing for something else and started being thankful for what I had found instead, the regret and disappointment started to evaporate. And I also realized that thanks-GIVING is really quite easy when you’re thank-FULL to start with.

Y, Melissa

Sabbath