Thanksgiving 2008

What are you thankful for this year? And to whom? I wish we had time to sit and rock together before the fireplace so I could hear all your answers. Maybe you will take the time to write something about what has happened to you this year and what that means in the larger picture of your hopes and dreams. You still have hopes and dreams, don’t you? If you do, then thank God and pursue them with all the passion He has put in you.

Thanksgiving is a great day to reflect back on your past and renew your perspective on life. That is, if you are not the one to be scrambling from refrigerator to stove to microwave to oven, trying to get the feast to come together at the appointed time. And if you are wise enough to turn off the television that is blaring football games, Christmas advertising, world crises, celebrity scandals and black Friday sales hype.

One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories is from when I lived in Germany with a wife and two school-aged children. We had to wait until Saturday since the children went to German public schools and Germany does not celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. And on that Saturday, we all participated in the preparation of the feast and in the clean-up. And after the kitchen was clean we all wrapped up and went for a walk in the woods. It was an unusually windy day and we found the woods to be almost deserted.

After walking for nearly an hour, we came across a forest ranger who was alarmed to find us out walking in his woods on such a windy day. He warned us that with these unusual winds, many trees could be blown down and he advised us to evacuate the forest immediately. We were somewhat amused at his alarm as we were from Colorado where the wind blows much harder than what we were seeing and we had never found ourselves in dire straits because of falling trees. But we heeded his warning and, since it was getting toward dusk anyway, we headed back to the car.

Because the trees there grew up in very different circumstances, the storm did bring down quite a number of trees that day. Since the trees seldom had to withstand strong winds, and since they were amply watered by frequent rain, they grew tall without developing massive root systems intertwining among rocks. And so a wind that would mean nothing in Colorado had a relatively drastic effect in Germany. But none of the trees fell on us. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any go down. But the next fall I did the ranger a favor by harvesting a few dozen beech trees that had fallen into a field planted with pine seedlings. Nice firewood!

At the Mental Health and Missions conference last week, one of the topics that was of great interest was resilience. How does an agency find candidates who will be resilient enough to keep bouncing back when cross-cultural missions throws something painful at them? Why is it that some people seem to be knocked out of missions by relatively minor negative circumstances and others keep going even after the rug has been pulled out from under them time after time? Nobody gave us the definitive answer to that question, but I would be surprised if a piece of the answer were not an attitude of gratitude.

If a missionary grows up in a place with generous amounts of loamy soil and good steady rainfall and seldom any wind, he might be blown over the first time the wind kicks up. But if he grows up with his roots struggling through thin, decomposing granite, where rainfall is seldom, brief and violent, and the wind blows the needles off his branches, by the time he gets to be six feet tall, he is very grateful for a day when he can bask in the sun for a whole hour without hardship threatening. In those moments I imagine that a tree would sigh deeply and send its roots deeper while it may.

So take a moment or two to look up in gratitude to the one whose face is shining down on you, take a deep breath right now between the storms of life and send your roots even deeper into His word.