Being grateful is one of the usual duties this season, and of course it is also the expectation of columnists. When November approaches December, most of us will find out what we are grateful for at some point.

You can list many years of gifts, events and occasions, people and relationships, and all the things we were grateful for last year, or at least as many as we recall from a favorable perspective. Eleventh month.

My thoughts are moving in a slightly different direction, not that I don’t have many good reasons to be grateful. But in the past few years, I have work to do before Thanksgiving, thank you... Well, let's put it this way: for things that I'm usually not grateful for in the first place.

I am still slowly adapting. I no longer become a parish priest or a regular missionary in the church. I go to the same forum every Sunday and preach to similar congregations week after week. That was the life I was used to decades ago, and like most people, I like the life I am used to.

However, it is blessed to have the freedom to take care of my family in the complications of COVID, and I have to force myself to assert this freedom. Meeting new faces, whether masked or otherwise, and preaching to a completely different group is completely different from what you did as a missionary the last time you got up to share the good news. It is a joy. To convey a message in this way requires stretching different preaching muscles, and I learned a few things about myself, about the church, and about faith.

As I wrote before, the aftermath of the death of my father and the closure of the family home in Indiana gave me a different view of my property, some of which have a strong emotional attachment. Apart from the cliché "you can't take it away", you can't even bring most of the money to the retirement community, and most of my son doesn't want to inherit it. I am grateful that I have started to build new relationships with my things, souvenirs, and things I (think I) cannot live without.

This year's new version is a new version of some of the same struggles we encountered last year. Don't involve too many personal details. This is also the time to face some restrictions. In myself, in other people, and when we (in our family anyway) start to evaluate what we can and cannot do, it’s a healthy time to figure out what’s possible, even if it’s not What we want to do. Clarity is a gift, a sharp but useful reflection.

So I found myself thanking my loss to some extent, thanking for reductions, cuts, and being able to concentrate even on a smaller field of view. Clarity is indeed a gift, and I want to express my gratitude for that.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and missionary in central Ohio. He thanked many people, but that was a different column. Tell him how you appreciate the unexpected on knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

This article originally appeared in the Newark Advocate: Backpack: Thanks for the big and small losses

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