Thanksgiving 2021

--photo collage by marcusrg / flikr

"Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that give glory to God, save this stranger."  --Luke 17. 17,18

This Thanksgiving comes at just the right time. Maybe it is true about every Thanksgiving. I turned off the TV after watching 10 minutes this morning. Dear God it was just too much. A Christmas parade destroyed with someone plowing a vehicle in to the happy marching band killing five--children. Children? All who have lost so many--over 600,000 in our country alone to this cursed Pandemic. January 6th. January 6th. January 6th. Gun ands more gun blotting out the lives of so very many.  Ugly threats to Doctors, nurses, aides who worked long, long hours trying to help the victims of our plague. Rage over vaccinations. Washington awash with hatred and division and finger-pointing. Getting even. Outbreaks there and wondering if this, too will spread. And Thanksgiving comes. 

We are not the first nor the last to live in the middle of a hurricane. We think of just today--us, ours, here. But the Bible alone mentions giving thanks 140 times. The backdrop. War and pestilence. Hungers and starvation. Tears and more tears. In every age there have been terrible convolutions. And set in the middle of these strange words for a dark time: Thanks. Praise. Gratitude. Amazing Grace. 

It is easy to give thanks when everything seems to be going well. Or easy to forget God.  But maybe Jesus was right, where in the midst of a world gone wrong, he asks the strangest question:"Where are the nine?" Anne Lamott reminds us: "If you've been around for a while, you know the much of the time, if you are patient and paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away."* Lord, I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in. Tail end of the line of course.

So we are to pay attention. To the wonders of this world and the wonders of the people we know.  And those we do not know. Like the man I see often walking, just walking. All over town.

No car. Face looks like he's hard time. Sometimes carrying a little filled grocery sack he got up the street. Limping but walking. Or the man I saw at Wendy's the other day. Just sitting there as people walked in to give their orders. He just watched. You could tell he had no money. No hand held out. No placard saying: I am hungry. Just there. Me? I ordered a bowl of chilli. I think Thanksgiving says if we praise long enough we will begin to respond to all those out there. The least of these. And many of the well-heeled too. Sometimes I think I missed that chapter.

Or as dear Mother Teresa said one time, "Young man I do what I can, where I am, with what I have." That's praise. I do believe that's Doxology. We really are to pay attention. Down in the mouth, troubled by many things--I wandered out on my porch and looked up. And there it was--a beautiful maple tree in my yard. Don Robertson wrote a book one time, Praise the Human Season. And maybe just maybe this Thanksgiving if we just pay attention to those around our table, and the food we are about to eat, looking out the window at it all--we too might praise this very human season and it may just save our souls after all.

*You might want to read Anne Lamott's book, Help Thanks Now - Riverhead Books

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com