This week we will sit down to dinner with family or friends, and gratitude will be the theme as we offer a blessing on the meal. It’s appropriate to Thanksgiving of course. We may even recall the story of the Pilgrims’ thankfulness for surviving their first difficult year in the New World.

At many of our tables someone will suggest, “Let’s go around the table and everyone say what they are grateful for.”

At times like this it’s easy to name good health, career success, and our kid’s accomplishments. This year many of us will be grateful that we still have jobs or homes or family living out of harm’s way. But we often forget that our lives are rarely black and white and that some of our best gifts don’t come in pretty wrapping. So here is a suggestion to put a new spin on the tradition. Today, ask your guests: What are the mixed blessings in your life this year?

Here are some examples: There was the day you were late and therefore missed the big accident or traffic jam; or the day you got lost in a new part of town but in your wandering found a store that sold exactly what you had been hunting for months. Get the idea?

Then up the ante a little: How about when you got fired but at out-placement you found the work you really want to do? Or maybe the person you wanted to marry said “No”, and broke your heart, but months later you met “The One.”

You get the idea, but push it a bit farther. How about the serious illness that knocked you off your feet but staying in bed gave you time to recast your life? Okay, even harder now: What about the death of a loved one that devastated you but one day in the midst of grief you felt something other than pain and realized you could feel joy as you never had before and you knew that you could feel it because the grief had cracked you open.

Similarly, you may have received a gift from someone else’s death because it made you see just how short life is and you decided to quit with the worry/status/fear and get on with your life.

These mixed blessings are not easy to accept or admit, and sometimes it is just faith that is the gift. It can be in the midst of terrible things that we’re forced to develop trust, and then we find, when the crisis is over, that our new beliefs are ours to keep.

Of course the highest level of this kind of gratitude is saying “Thank You” even before the good part comes. If you’ve had some experience with mixed blessings you begin to know-- even while life is painful or unpleasant-- that there will be meaning in it. And so we say Thank You –purely on faith – even when we’re getting hit hard.

Yes, most of these blessings come in less than Hallmark moments. Maybe it was the painful feedback from a friend that clued you in on a truth about your personality, or the DWI that was humiliating and expensive but that’s what it took to make you face an addiction and change your life.

As parents we coach our kids with, “What do you say?” when a gift is given. Could we learn to say that to ourselves when life hands us a package that isn’t very pretty?

So this Thanksgiving when, “What are you grateful for?” comes around to you at the dinner table, dig deep. Name the blessings that came from pain and grief or loss and trouble. When we can say “Thanks” for both the good and the bad, for both easy and hard times, then, just like the early settlers, we’ll have a real Thanksgiving.

Diane Cameron
Albany, New York