|
|
|
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. One of the sad feelings I have about living in Alaska is that my children will not have the kind of special memories of Thanksgiving with their grandparents that I had with mine. Driving over the hills of southern Ohio to a warm and loving home, graced by prayer and great food, laughter, football, and games with cousins. Without the hullabaloo of the Christmas spending frenzy, Thanksgiving holiday was truly an experience where I learned how to be thankful. Do you know how to be thankful? It is one thing to give thanks. We say thank you to the cashier at Carr’s. We say thank you to the operator who secured our plane reservation. We say thank you to the person who opened a door for us. But do we truly know how to be thankful? A 4-year-old boy was asked to pray before Thanksgiving dinner. The family members bowed their heads in expectation. He began his prayer, thanking God for all his friends, naming them one by one. Then he thanked God for Mommy, Daddy, brother, sister, Grandma, Grandpa, and all his aunts and uncles. Then he began to thank God for the food. He gave thanks for the turkey, the dressing, the fruit salad, the cranberry sauce, the pies, the cakes, even the Cool Whip. Then he paused, and everyone waited--and waited. After a long silence, the young fellow looked up at his mother and asked, "If I thank God for the broccoli, won't he know that I'm lying?" Here’s a boy who knows how to be real with God. Even 4-year olds know how to be thankful. Part of the reality of growing up is that we have a tendency to leave behind basic truths we were taught in kindergarten. Being thankful is one of them. Among teenagers suddenly it’s not cool to say thanks for little things. As adults it feels weird to thank God for simples things like sunshine, or clean water, or a gentle breeze. We think we’re too sophisticated for childlike prayers like these. We know in our heads that thanksgiving should run deep to the center of our being. But our attempts at giving thanks seem to lurk more near the surface of our souls. Gratitude is a state of being that we experience at different levels. In other words, how deep does your thanksgiving go? Does most of your thanksgiving just reach the surface level where it rarely receives much conscious or lingered thought? When was the last time your prayer of thanksgiving took you directly to the center of your heart and into the presence of God? I suggest that there are two ways to take our gratitude to the depths. The first is when we experience a crisis. The fact is that people tend to pray more fervently when going through a crisis than when all is well. We hear the diagnosis of cancer. A spouse wants a divorce. A family member has fallen victim to a crime of violence. When faced with the sudden loss of something or someone dear to our hearts we are made aware of what we had. And perhaps our thanksgiving did not run very deep as the pain of loss now strikes. How comfortable are you in probing the depths of your soul? Do you become anxious when someone begins talking about feelings that reside at the core of who we are? It’s certainly not something I want to talk about every day with God or with others. But I do need to spend some time slowly knowing who I am down deep in my heart. If I don’t allow my thanksgiving to take me to the depths, then the hurt of a sudden and unexpected loss will take me there and it will feel very strange and lonely and painful. Why? Because I won’t be familiar with the deep places. I won’t know my way around. Major losses in our lives will be felt, not at the surface, but at the very depths of who we are. I know it and you know it. Everyone of us will get that phone call or visit from someone telling us about a tragic loss. If we have already spent time with our thanksgiving in the deep places, we will know that God is with us even during the most difficult and grief-stricken time of our lives. In 1636, amid the darkness of the Thirty Years' War, a German pastor, Martin Rinkart, is said to have buried five thousand of his parishioners in one year, and average of fifteen a day. His parish was ravaged by war, death, and economic disaster. In the heart of that darkness, with the cries of fear outside his window, he sat down and wrote this table grace for his children: 'Now thank we all our God / With heart and hands and voices;/ Who wondrous things had done,/ In whom His world rejoices. /Who, from our mother's arms,/Hath led us on our way/ With countless gifts of love/ And still is ours today.' Here was a man who knew thanksgiving is a way of life that runs deep within the soul, a place where God lives. The second way to take our gratitude to the depths is comparison. Sometimes all we need do is to compare what blessings we have with what we might not have at some future time. We have our health, our families, our home, our jobs. But we won’t always have these things. In Budapest, a man goes to a rabbi and complains, "Life is unbearable. There are nine of us living in one room. What can I do?" The rabbi answers, "Take your goat into the room with you." The man is incredulous, but the rabbi insists. "Do as I say and come back in a week." A week later the man comes back looking more distraught than before. "We cannot stand it," he tells the rabbi. "The goat is filthy." The rabbi then tells him, "Go home and let the goat out. And come back in a week." A radiant man returns to the rabbi a week later, exclaiming, "Life is beautiful. We enjoy every minute of it now that there's no goat -- only the nine of us." I venture a guess that every single person in this room today has had an experience where we were made acutely aware of the blessings we once took for granted. Like so many women, columnist and humorist, Erma Bombeck, had breast cancer. In 1992 she wrote, "An estimated 1.5 million people are living today after bouts with breast cancer. Every time I forget to feel grateful to be among them, I hear the voice of an eight-year-old named Christina, who had cancer of the nervous system. When asked what she wanted for her birthday, she thought long and hard and finally said, "I don't know. I have two sticker books and a Cabbage Patch doll. I have everything!" Can you say with Christina that with all that you have right now, you have everything? You may have cancer in your body, or extreme financial problems, or teens that are making terrible choices, or pain that won’t go away. With all that you don’t have, can you say thank you to God for what you do have? And can you allow God to take your thanksgiving to the depths of your heart and soul? This is what thanksgiving is all about. It is more than counting our blessings. It is more than breathing a quick prayer in church. It is more than positive thinking. Thanksgiving that runs deep in our hearts means we take the time to think about the many gifts God has given us. And sometimes those deep thoughts will move us to act. When William Stidger taught at Boston University, he once reflected upon the great number of un-thanked people in his life. Those who had helped nurture him, inspire him or who cared enough about him to leave a lasting impression. One was a schoolteacher he'd not heard of in many years. But he remembered that she had gone out of her way to put a love of verse in him, and Will had loved poetry all his life. He wrote a letter of thanks to her. The reply he received, written in the feeble scrawl of the aged, began, "My dear Willie." He was delighted. Now over 50, bald and a professor, he didn't think there was a person left in the world who would call him "Willie." Here is that letter: My dear Willie, I cannot tell you how much your note meant to me. I am in my eighties, living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely and, like the last leaf of autumn, lingering behind. You will be interested to know that I taught school for 50 years and yours is the first note of appreciation I ever received. It came on a blue-cold morning and it cheered me as nothing has in many years. When we take the time to allow God to take our thanksgiving to the depths, we do things like writing letters to teachers who made a difference, to coaches we’ll never forget, to the Sunday School teacher or Scout leader who helped us believe in ourselves. When our thanksgiving goes to the depths, we will be moved, sometimes to tears, for all the good God is giving us. When our thanksgiving goes to the depths, we can say with the writer of Ephesians, "[I] give thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."
|
The St. John Web Site needs your input! Click here to leave feedback Copyright © 1998-2004 Jon S. Dawson. Last modified: February 01, 2009
|
11.23.03 - The Depths of Thanksgiving (Ephesians 5:15-20)
