Giving Thanks: Memories & Family

This week we're going to celebrate a special day that's quickly being overwhelmed by the holiday that comes after it. I do enjoy Christmas and I'm already pulling out the Christmas playlists, but I don't want to miss Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving for me means memories of warm kitchens, people bustling everywhere, laughter, and delicious food. I remember eating rolls slathered in butter and having second helpings of cranberry sauce and turkey. I grew up listening to my mom read Cranberry Thanksgiving, a book about a girl and her grandmother who live in a cranberry bog in New England. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend!

Thanksgiving also means memories of a turkey so big that my dad had to run out to the barn and build a cutting board big enough to hold it! Or the times my siblings and I would make turkey hands to set up on the table.

It's a wonderful time of year to come together with family and celebrate all we have to be thankful for. Colossians 2:6-7 says, "Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving."

I don't want to miss or pass over the reality, however, that for many, Thanksgiving is a time of tension or grief for the loss of a loved one. I've never known what that felt like until this year. Several relatives, some closer than others passed away this year. Thanksgiving won't look exactly the same and it won't be easy, but God has shown me that even here in the pain of a broken world, He is with me.

That's something I've learned and been shown again and again over the past few months. It doesn't take away the pain of loss, but it's a comfort and a truth to cling too that we have a God who walks beside us in the paths of deepest darkness and suffering. He doesn't always take away the sorrow or suffering. Most of the time He won't. But he will walk beside us through it, leading and guiding us. That's how we learn to depend on Him.

We also don't grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). One day, all who believe in Christ for salvation will be raised to eternal life with Him. That is glorious news!

However your Thanksgiving looks this year, I hope you will not forget the One who gives us all we need, who provides for us in joy and in sadness, and who is worthy of our lives, our worship, our all.

Happy Thanksgiving!