Ugly Turkey

We had our Thanksgiving women's bible study. Lovely as always, with good word and lots of fun. Everyone got a cute little turkey made of a fall leaf, paper, marker, and a clothes pin. It's super cute. But it was apparently meant to be ugly. The idea was that we always thank God for the great and wonderful things He does in our lives. We should also be thanking Him for the ugly, unpleasant, dark, difficult things. He's in control of all of it, and we should be grateful. Especially because we know good comes from it in the end. We were meant to write something on this little turkey. We could throw it out or keep it, as long as we remembered to give thanks for it. Admittedly? The first thing I thought of was Trump. I almost thanked God for that awful man, because I knew that even he is God's creation and even though I knew he inspired so much hate and violence and judgement and malicious action, there's been an outpouring of peace and compassion and assistance trying to drown him out. I wanted to think about the negative things that changed my year. The depression. The stress. I was very close to writing my job down, if I'm being honest. But then I decided on something that has inspired a lot of my bad decisions and hardest breakdowns in the past year. Something that I am still not 100% at peace with, though for different reasons now than initially. Something that I pretend to see God's hand in but really just kind of hope with all my heart and faith in Him that this was the right decision and that He made it this was for some reason completely unknown to me. I'm annoyed at how pathetic this option was. But it was just cryptic enough that my manager couldn't get offended and my friends would have no clue what it meant. I wrote 7.17.16. And it's going to sit on my shelf. And if it's the last thing I'll do, I'll learn to be grateful for it. And for the fact that where I am now is leagues beyond where any of us were then.