Over the last few days we have looked at the place of thanksgiving, in our relationship with the Holy Spirit and in being filled by Him continuously, and then in our relationship with Jesus, in walking with Him day by day, and letting Him help us with our cares and burdens. Today it felt like it was the Fathers turn, and I fell to thinking about Fathers day cards.
I love reading the cards my daughters write to my husband. They don’t just grab a card from the rack and sign it, they choose one carefully and then add their own thanks to him, for their unique experience of, and blessing from his fathering of them. In other words they make it a very personalised expression of thanks, from them to him.
It is always a thrill to see what they have noticed of his love and care for them and what has mattered to them over the past years, at different stages in their lives. Sometimes what they have remembered, and what has been important to them, comes as a nice surprise. The truth is that one size doesn’t fit all with cards, and so it is with our experience of, and thanks to, God as our loving heavenly Father.
There are so many beautiful songs and hymns, thanking God for who He is to us, and for His goodness and faithfulness, and these can really helps us to express our love to Him. Today however I felt that we should make it our own ‘Fathers day’ and whenever we can, throughout the day, let us lift our heart to Him and say ‘thank you’ for things that He has done that are personal to us.
We can ask the Holy Spirit to remind us of specific things for which we can be grateful from past years. There are so many things big and small, and for some it will be a miraculous healing or provision, even a new baby when it was thought there would be none.
For many of us however our thanksgiving will be, I guess, for the more everyday things that have mattered to us. This could be for someone He has used to help us, for guidance or wisdom when we have needed it, even that parking space when there was no time to waste getting to an appointment or, in the case of one of our friends, catching a plane!!
It’s like that lovely song, ‘Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done’. Well today let us not just ‘count’ those blessings, but let us turn our hearts in thanksgiving to Him, our good, good, Father, and surprise Him (I’m not sure that’s even possible, but we can certainly delight Him) with our thanksgiving for things it might have looked like we had taken for granted.
If we are feeling creative we could spend some time making and writing a thank you card for Him, or we could write our own psalm of thanksgiving, or ‘sing a new song to Him’ like Psalm 98 or many others. In our own way let us make this a ‘thank you heavenly Father day’, all day.
