Since Thanksgiving is just around the corner, thankfulness has been on my mind. I recently came across Ecclesiastes 7:10: “Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” Guilty. I have constantly longed for a fantasy conjured up by blissful scenes from Anne of Green Gables, lamenting that ‘surely the past looked like that’. Of course if you are a student of history at all, you know that a lot of things are actually quite a bit better now than they were before. And if you are a student of life, you know that the screen does not reflect reality.

So if we aren’t supposed to long for the days of yore, then by all accounts, longing for them is a perpetual state of discontentment, and discontentment is unthankfulness. So when I romanticize churning butter, horse-drawn wagons, or lathe and plaster, and curse the sink full of dishes, or the laundry that needs to be folded, it is folly, not wisdom.

So although Thanksgiving shouldn’t be the only time of the year that we remember to be thankful, it can be the catalyst for a renewed state of perpetual thanksgiving. And for that, I am thankful.

God bless your November.