Watch In The Same With Thanksgiving

She noticed the dread about three weeks ago and she has been trying not to notice it since.

It goes like this. She sits down at the time she has set aside, which she asked God for and which she is glad to have, and she opens the notebook, and there they are. Her son. The diagnosis. The other diagnosis. The friend who is not speaking to her. The money thing. The thing with the neighbor that has been going on for two years and has no end in it anywhere.

She reads them out. That is what her praying has become: a woman reading God an inventory of everything that is wrong, item by item, and there are eleven items now and there were six when she started this.

And she means every word. That is not the problem. The problem is that she gets up at the end of it heavier than she sat down, every single time, and after enough weeks of that, a person starts to feel a small sinking as the time approaches.

She has begun finding reasons. Nothing dramatic. Just a load that suddenly needs doing at exactly the hour.

If you have started dreading the time you asked for, come and sit down in here. Nobody is going to take one item off your list.

There is a third word in the instruction and she has been doing two

Paul gives an instruction about this in about nine words, and almost everybody who quotes it quotes the first two thirds.

Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving.Colossians 4:2

Continue in prayer. She does that. Nobody continues harder.

Watch in the same. She does that too, in her way, with real attention, which is exactly why it costs her so much.

With thanksgiving. That is the third one and it is the one nobody handed her, and it is not decoration on the end of the sentence. It is joined to the watching by the word with, which makes it part of the equipment rather than a nice addition once the important business is done.

And notice where it sits. It is not instead of the watching. Paul is not saying be positive. He is not suggesting she take items off the list, and he is not telling her to feel differently about the eleven. He is telling her what to carry while she carries them.

You have been doing two thirds of an instruction and calling the exhaustion a failure of faith. Colossians 4:2 is where that sits, in a sentence whose third clause is bolted onto the second, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write all nine words is the one who lets a tired woman hear the missing one without shame.

Why thanksgiving is load bearing and not a mood

Let me say what this is not, first, because if you get this wrong it becomes one more weight and I would rather cut my hand off.

This is not gratitude as a technique. It is not being told to count your blessings by somebody who has never had eleven items. It is not a suggestion that if she were more thankful the list would shorten, which is nonsense and is a cruelty when it is said to a woman with a diagnosis in front of her.

Here is what it actually does. A list read alone is a report on a world where God has not acted. That is not what she believes, but it is what the hour is shaped like, because the hour contains only the unresolved things.

Thanksgiving puts the other evidence in the room. Not instead of the list. In the same room as the list. It is the part of the hour where the things He has actually done get said out loud, so that the eleven items are held by somebody who has just remembered who she is talking to.

That is why it is joined to the watching. Watching without it is surveillance. Watching with it is a woman keeping vigil beside a God she has evidence about.

You have real evidence already, and it is already in your own history, and none of it stopped being true when the eleventh item arrived. He promised it, in the psalm that says forget not all his benefits (Psalm 103:2), and His Spirit is the one who brings a specific old kindness back to mind at the moment it is needed.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there never will be one.

And there are diagnoses on your list. So let me be completely plain: nothing on this site connects going without food to anybody getting well. Not once, not as a hint. Where illness is in the room, you and the people you love stay with your doctors and you keep doing exactly what they say.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of it fails anything.

You have never been further from Him because your body or anybody's body has limits, and you never were. That is 2 Corinthians 8:12, not my reassurance, and His Spirit has never once been given out according to what a family is medically able for.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.