Thanksgiving

This is a Thanksgiving message – really.   Please, keep reading.  Oh, and in case I don’t say it enough, I am thankful for you.

My brother fried the turkey for Thanksgiving this year.  When he dropped it into the peanut oil that bird made an awful stench.  But over the next hour the stinkiness dissipated to be replaced by a more pleasing odor, something that a reasonable person would actually want to eat.

My year has kind of been like that deep-fried turkey.  January plunged me into a world of hurt – admittedly some of which I kind of chose for myself – depends on your perspective, I guess.  February through April didn’t bring much reprieve, but then came May, and bits of the searing pain simmered down.  By October I felt like there may be a chance that someday I could breathe again.  It’s the end of November now, and the fry basket in which I have been living might just be lifting out of that oil sludge.  Maybe – hopefully.

So, where has God been in all of this?  Some days that has been my question – my often asked (cried, moaned, shouted) question.  And though I have not always felt Him, not always heard Him, what I believe, what I know, is that He has been beside me the entire time.  Each time I cried, each time I moaned, each time I shouted He heard; He knew because He never left me, not once.  I know this because He promised He would not.

So, why did He allow this horrible, awful, terrible (Are you getting the picture?)  time in my life?  Why did He not do what the God of the Impossible could do and step in and make the pain go away?  Well, in all honesty, I don’t know; but I can guess.  I surmise that I needed to learn that I was strong enough to extricate myself from the mess my life had become, that I was strong enough to survive, that I was important enough to survive.  I can also guess that I needed to learn that God is always there, in the wee hours of the morning when no one else is awake; when I’ve locked myself out of the house again and there is no one with a key and I just want to lie down on the grass and let the ants eat my face off; when the mean airline lady tells me she’s not letting me on my connecting flight in Chicago because my itty-bitty dog is crying too much in his teeny-tiny kennel, and it will bother the other passengers and no one ever talked to me like that when I traveled with a man. (Next time I’m just going to walk super close to a very large guy and pretend we’re together.)  Also, these things needed to happen to push me into another place in  life, and sometimes things that happen that rock my world are about more than just me.  Hmmmh.

But most off all, I think what I needed to learn was that you take the good with the bad.  In my life I have received so many blessings – family, friends, a home, food on the table, health care, a steady income.  The list could go on and on.  If I am willing to take what I know are blessings from God’s outstretched hand, then I must also be willing to take the events that at first blush appear to be at the very least disappointments, maybe even eviscerating traumas.  But more than that, not only must I be willing to accept these things, I must be willing to be grateful for them because even if I cannot see it when they occur, somehow, someway these events are blessings.  How could they not be?  They have all been God-filtered.  I’m not saying I have to like them, but I have to be thankful for them.   And so for all these things, these joys, these pains, I say, “Thank you.”

Happy Thanksgiving.