The Thankful Jar | Marking Moments Through the Year with a Spirit of Thanksgiving

Last year my heart met the Christmas season with a spirit of desperate, expectant faith. We were tired, we were broken, and so much of our lives felt unsettled and undone. What I hoped for and prayed for was that God would change our situation. What He did instead was change my heart.

In the first few days of January, I ran across a post on a friend’s FB timeline – a simple picture of a jar filled to the brim with notes of things to be thankful for. Truthfully, I don’t remember what the caption at the bottom of the picture read, but what I took away from that moment was that everyone has something to be thankful for if only we’d pause long enough to think about it.

At that moment, the only thing I could see in my life was everything that was wrong and everything I wanted changed. Being thankful was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time, and I knew I needed that component in my life to prevent my heart from becoming bitter, unfeeling and hard.

I grabbed a mason jar from the basement, pulled out a silver sharpie and wrote the words {The Thankful Jar} across the front. I set it up on the top of my oven, where I’d see it daily, and purposed to fill it throughout the year with moments of thanksgiving, to help me remember that even in the midst of our frustration and struggle, God was still moving.

I took a moment over the weekend to fancy up my jar, and with tears streaming down my face I read the notes I had written so far. God’s faithfulness to us over the last eleven months is overwhelming. Every need. Every need. Every need He supplied with unexpected favor, abundant blessing, and tender moments marked by His goodness. God met us this year in ways that were absolutely unimaginable to me in January, but I caught them, because I was looking.

And that – in a very real way – has changed everything.