We’re Never Alone at Thanksgiving!
All Thanksgiving, already and thankfully is, a Togethering.
by Ralph Blair
(PDF version available here)
Each year, in late October or early November, it’s usually singles, who’re asked a friendly question many find awkward to answer.
Yet, in 2020, given lockdowns and social distancing restrictions, it wasn’t so awkward to answer. But, in 2021, triple-vaccinated and masked, it could, again, be an awkward question to answer.
So, what’s the question? It’s usually asked in a very upbeat way, with anticipatory excitement: “So, whatch’ya gonna’ do for Thanksgiving?” To cover-up for not having been invited to any Thanksgiving Day affair, and not wanting to be thought of as, “not wanted” – people compose, in postured “carefree” defensiveness: “Oh, I haven’t made up my plans, yet.” That made-up dodge will work a lot better in early-October than it will in mid-November.
Others actually decline invitations that they do get. Why? They don’t want to get stuck with family, in-laws or friends fighting over politics and religion or to be held hostage in front of endless hours of widescreen football games in which they have no interest at all.
Yet, even these who deliberately avoid all of the squabbling and the lonely isolation, cooped up and surrounded by the hooting and hollering over football, still receive sympathy, “Oh, I’m so sad that you’ll be all alone on Thanksgiving Day!” “Thanks, but I’m not sad, so don’t be sad for me. Stuck alone in the middle of all that bitter bickering over politics or stuck with all those football games, and all their endless innings [sic] is what I’m so gladly escaping.”
Actually, and here’s the real point: Missing mere “company” on Thanksgiving Day, misses the real mark of all true thanksgiving!
Truly, definitionally: We’re never alone at thanksgiving! We are never alone at being thankful, at giving thanks, whether the one or the many for whom we’re thankful are still with us or have now passed away. We gratefully give thanks for what all they have meant to us, and still mean to us, for all the good we’ve received.
Thanksgiving is, itself, a togethering, a blessed ingathering, if you will. It’s a plural – one is thankful, and another or others, are thanked, whether there in person, at even some distance away, or simply in one’s privately peaceful recollection and fond memories.
Besides the people in our lives, now or back there, whenever, there are and have always been, intangibles, entire contexts, gifted abilities, interests, perspectives, empathic inclinations, aesthetics, talents, sensibilities, lessons learned, lessons still to learn, even from our mistakes, and surely, the great gift of sheer thankfulness, itself, for which we can always be so thankful. Any thanksgiving is a lifesaver!
If thankful for even one thing or one person, there’s at least something or someone that’s been a blessing. And there’s also Someone for Whom we ought to be thankful that we’re not alone, when we consider what all we’ve been given so freely, that’s not been given to us by us, or by other folks. God gives us Himself!
These true discoveries bring more gratitude and our very most precious awareness of them adds to yet even greater gratitude.
So, here’s the reasonable response to someone’s asking, “So, whatch’ya gonna’ do for Thanksgiving?” And it’s not smart-alecky to be smart enough to so thankfully reply: “I’m gonna’ be thankful! That’s what I’m gonna’ do for Thanksgiving!”
That response can reinforce your own awareness of truth, and can be a helpfully thought-provoking perspective for the one who asked. Thank the inquirer for asking, and thus, prevent him or her from mistaking your wise reply as merely a rude “wise crack”.
So, let yourself be even more thankful by truly thinking about it, by truly implementing it! And, by that deeper awareness, you’ll grow, gratefully, even more deeply thankful. You can count on it.
It’s the truth, as we count our many blessings, recognizing that, throughout our lives, there’ve been those who’ve really and truly been there for us, no matter how many, we may have thought, or might even still think, weren’t there for us.
And, of those we think “weren’t” there for us, let’s note that, this is just our take on them. We can’t be so cocksure that we’re so right about all of them, especially after all of these years of our reinforcing our resentments, with wily echoes of enticement from sycophants who seek to please us for their own selfish purposes.
But if, in any sense, we’re right about some having let us down, we need to help ourselves, and them, too, by forgiving them. We then can thank ourselves for unloading that heavy burden we’ve stubbornly, self-centeredly, carried on our backs for far too long. And, we now may be able to improve our being there, for them.
Quite commonly, we miss out on being thankful by our holding ourselves hostage to our selfishly limited understandings. Yet, as Christians, we can be liberated by the wider understanding that’s anchored in God’s eternal love and forgiveness available for all.
Rather than be so distracted by how we want things to go, how we “needed” things to be, based in our limited awareness and our selfishness and self-centered perspectives, and fantasies of roads never traveled, we need to stop misleading ourselves into thinking that, to be thankful, we must always have it “our way” in order to feel happy or pleased with our selfish definitions of that for which we can or can’t be thankful. We need to be rid of that nonsense!
But God’s perspective is so very much wiser, wider and so, far deeper, so very much more loving than ours ever was, is or can be in our fantasies! Wouldn’t you say that, His interpretations and evaluations of all things that ever were, are, or ever will be, are so much more comprehensive than ours? Yet, blindly, so foolishly, we limit ourselves inside our own horizons, failing to be grateful for God’s lovingly wise Providence. We woefully miss, not only a bigger picture, but we miss the most truly everlastingly sovereign Reality of all the reality that ever was, is and ever will be. Right?
The prophet Habakkuk, some six centuries before Christ came, preached in a very difficult world. So, he appealed for the Lord’s intervention and was assured that the Lord was aware of all of it and would deal with it all in His own way and in His time. So, for Habakkuk, that settled the matter, in faith, in God. Awareness of God’s knowledge and compassionate power, not mere positivity, should settle such matters for all of the unsettled today, just as back then. Habakkuk wrote the following with confidence in God:
Though the fig tree doesn’t bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet, I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, empowering me to tread upon the very heights. (Habakkuk 3:17ff)
Paul, too, gives insightful instruction, urging: “In everything, give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus, for you” (I Thess 5:18). “Everything”, of course, includes, everything! He doesn’t say, we should enjoy everything, but to give thanks, in everything, for we, along with Paul, are in on the sacred secret, whatever else we may not know: “We do know that all things do, indeed, work together, for good, to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Rom 8:28)
Have we never been pleasantly surprised by something’s going the opposite way from how we thought we needed it to go? Have we never been disappointed by something’s not going as we’d wanted it to go, only later realizing what all we missed of misery?
It should be gratitude, whatever the grind, for there’s more in the grind than what’s readily obvious. (Cf also: Col 1:12; 3:15ff; Rom 14:6; I Cor 10:30) Golgotha’s awful grind led to awe-filled Glory!
By reliance on the Truth of God’s goodness, we sense, not only a bigger picture than the presently passing parameters of today’s troubles may seem to display, not only the forgotten troubles that upset us yesterday, last month, or years ago, the details of which we’ve long since lost track of, but we can sense that God’s eternal embrace, from before the creation of the universe, assures us of the grace-filled meaning of all that we, alone, on our own, simply can’t grasp, nor do we need to grasp, at any distracted moment.
Paul said: “In everything give thanks.” Our kneejerk reaction is a clueless one-word of complaint, “Everything?” Well, what’s not within God’s omniscience? What’s not under God’s eternal love?
Giving thanks, in a sense, is an act of will. But, still, it’s based in the knowledge of God’s goodness. Feeling thankful is an emotion produced by the knowledge that God is good. We can freely give thanks, inasmuch as we are convinced of the truth of what Paul said, “In all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” (Rom 8:28)
So, let’s join in prayer with two great men who conversed with God. Shakespeare, who was not unacquainted with grief, said, “O Lord, that lends me life, lend me also a heart replete with thankfulness.” This was so well worth an “Amen!” from George Herbert, that he, in his own words to the Lord, said: “Thou who hast given so much to me, give me one thing more – a grateful heart.” Great minds can be wisely grateful! Be, likewise, as wise!
To be grateful is, by definition, to be in a good relationship. And not just any good relationship, but one that’s so very valuable, so gratifying, that gratefulness, itself, is entwined within it. This is the case whether the relationship is with one other person, several others, or is, and by far, and best of all – with God, Himself, our Creator, our Redeemer and our loving Heavenly Father, forever!
The truly grateful are truly never alone, as they can give thanks – whenever, wherever, and with whomever they’re truly grateful.
It’s no wonder – yet, it’s even well beyond wonderful – that, in the Bible, gratitude, thanksgiving, is the joyful experience of our relationship with the God of Providence Who truly provides for all of our deepest needs by His deep wisdom and His eternal love.
G. K. Chesterton wrote: “I would maintain that, thanks are the highest form of thought; and that, gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” That’s a thought worth contemplating into wonder!
David knew this wonder from his days as a shepherd boy. He would later express it, thousands of years ago now, in words of praise to the One he called his Shepherd. In peace that wouldn’t always be so familiar to him, David gazed up into those spacious skies at night, while his sheep, in peace, under his shepherding, grazed, but with their eyes to the ground, oblivious to the One Who so captivated David’s attention, as he gazed up at all those stars in the sky above him, above his sheep, and even far above those skies themselves, in a consciously deeper peace than all those skies and sheep could ever know.
What he saw with his eyes, unaided by telescope or scientific data on astronomy of which we’re aware, he felt in his heart. He was not at all aware that some of that light shining into his eyes, came from, not merely millions of miles away, but from millions of light years away. Yet, even with our “sophisticated” frames of reference, distracted by city lights and our own self-generated blindness, do we ever get even close to all the grateful awe of David’s awareness of God’s Presence, looking up into the starry skies that we see with more detailed scientific information, yet we so casually take it all for granted? David didn’t; we shouldn’t.
At the opening ceremonies of the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, a large children’s choir was forced to sing John Lennon’s nonsense, “Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us, above us only sky.” These were the tempting lies of a snake in the grass of Eden, and Adam and Eve fooled themselves as that 20th-century copycat did. Presumably, Lennon knew a bit more science than David, but he didn’t want to know Who David knew.
David had not the faintest notion of how vast was what his eyes beheld, or what stretched far beyond what his eyes could see. Yet, he knew that it was all God’s handiwork, and on that, he was absolutely on target, unlike so many folks today who may know something more about the science, but not the Truth behind it all.
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars fill the universe! That’s two billion trillion. And probably, planets orbit so many of them.
To David, it was really all about God’s brief, but so powerfully creative words that spoke everything into existence when God said: “Let there be light!” – and, look, there was light! (Gen 1:3)
So, David joined with the heavens, to declare his joy in what he saw, and Who he knew, was far beyond those silently spacious skies, so far above his head, and yet, so deep within his heart. In contrast to Lennon’s self-centeredness, David focused on God:
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they make Him known without words; no sound is ever heard. Yet, their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” (Ps 19:1-4)
God’s Word in flesh would, Himself, one day, be born at Royal David’s city, to be and to declare, as God’s Personified Word, His Good News of redemption for fallen humanity, by his sacrifice and resurrection, to be proclaimed, ever since, by faithful followers, to “the ends of the world”. Thanks to God, we, get to share that.
Paul would one day add his own praise in awe of God, writing to converts at Rome, “From Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.” (Rom 11:36)
We’re never alone if we’re thankful, even “by ourselves”, as it were, on any Thanksgiving Day holiday, for He is there with us.
Whenever we’re thankful, 365 days every year, each morning, all day long and on into the deepest of darkest nights, whenever we’re thankful for our past, our present and for our ever-present Savior and Lord, now and in all of our future, forever and ever!
Hymns have been written for Thanksgiving Day. Yet, so many more hymns are full of thanksgiving, without one reference to fall harvest festivals. They’re hymns of Blessed Hope. They refer to a Heavenly Harvest that the redeemed await with Christian faith.
In the 19th Century, the grateful Philip P. Bliss wrote words and music for his exclamatory hymn, full of thanksgiving, “Hallelujah! What a Savior!” That’s straight speech, isn’t it! His contemplative words of gratitude, go right to the very heart of God’s Good News.
“Man of Sorrows!”, what a name, For the Son of God, who came;
Ruined sinners to reclaim. Hallelujah! What a Savior!
Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood. Hallelujah! What a Savior!
Guilty, vile, and helpless we; Spotless Lamb of God was He;
Full atonement! – can it be? Hallelujah! What a Savior!”
Lifted up was He, to die, “It is finished!”, was His cry;
Now in heaven, exalted high; Hallelujah! What a Savior!
When He comes, our glorious King, To His Kingdom, us to bring,
Then, anew, this song we’ll sing; Hallelujah! What a Savior!
Bliss faithfully reminded us of Jesus’ crucifixion, 19 centuries after that brutal scene at Golgotha, and some 26 centuries after Isaiah’s prophesy of it (Isa 53), and billions of years, as it were, after The Lamb was committed to be slain “from the foundation of the world”, as John, would later reveal it, in awe, to all. (Rev 13:8).
But, Bliss’ hymn of truth that, so thankfully reminds us of God’s amazing grace in Christ, isn’t sung very much these days. Why? What’s wrong with it? Nothing’s wrong with it. But performance is what matters much more nowadays, in “Contemporary Praise & Worship” music. Plain-spoken biblical theology has been pushed aside for a trendy “atmosphere” that’s “with it”, with “star-power” performances, starring me, myself and I, in a dark auditorium with bands under colorful spotlights and overbearingly amplified noise.
Yet, nothing is outdated in Bliss’s plain-spoken thanks, or in his straightforward exclamations of awe over the revelations of that supremely supernatural intervention of God, Himself, in Christ, for full redemption of sinners and eternal reconciliation with God. It’s God’s redeeming truth that prompts such eternal thanksgiving.
These lyrics of Bliss are so clear and so much more explicitly unambiguous than contemporary repetitions of a single syllable or a vacuous sound that lacks any intelligibly meaningful narrative of salvation’s truths by which one could be informed, thus, thankful, recalling gracious historical facts, redemptive applications of the Good News and the heavenly forecasts of being forgiven forever in God’s Gracious Presence. Hallelujah! What a Savior, indeed!
Henrietta C. Mears, adored “Mother” of 20th-century Evangelical Renewal, knew that gracious Savior was her Savior, too. And, as that quite interestingly eccentric educator in her Sunday Schools at Hollywood’s First Presbyterian Church, she’d often remark: “All that I see teaches me to thank the Creator for all I cannot see.” She had in mind, maybe, what brings joy and what brings sorrow.
She lived her faith in Christ, regardless of all of the conventional notions that she was a tad too “odd”, maybe even a lesbian. But then, others, also deemed “odd”, received God’s love by way of her abundant love and her own very warm welcome to them.
And our thanksgiving, too, is a gifted way to vitally connect with one another, especially with the unwelcomed – the oddest of all varieties, even our own. In our redeemed relationship, designed by our Creator and Redeemer against self-centered isolation and estrangement, we, too can truly afford to love others who’ve also, so badly lost their way, inside themselves and inside their self-presumed, self-serving presuppositions about and against God.
It’s in these gifts of our awareness of God’s creation of us all, and in thanksgiving for God’s grace, that we, too, can so readily afford, not only to thank God, but to share in our thanksgiving with fellow image-bearers of God, throughout our one human race, all created in God’s Image. By God’s grace, we’re created to be for the welfare of one another and so, to become thankful with one another. And we can fully afford to do so, so fully loved by God.
All are grateful when they’re thanked – and, the less perfunctory the “thank you”, the more genuine it is, the happier, more blessed, more grateful, are those who’re thanked, and those, too, who can thank them. As all this makes sense, isn’t it, thus, thankworthy?
Yet, sadly, humanity has been, from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be – except for God’s intervening grace in Christ – at odds with each other, in self-righteously sick self-centeredness, relentlessly refusing to be grateful, trying to insist, against all the evidence, that “we’re” not as bad as “them”. Yet, all our nervous accusations against “them”, mean “we’re” trying to hide our guilt. But this trick never tricks the trickster, who knows no better trick.
One who didn’t need to hide her guilt, for she knew it was nailed to Christ’s cross, was gratefully able to spend herself serving the needs and welfare of many others, even at the risk of her own life.
After the end of World War II, when I was just 7-years-old in our German Reformed Sunday School’s basement, I saw this strange woman who seemed, to me, to be so very old, coming down the stairs. She walked right over to me, shook my hand, and asked me my name. I told her my name. Then she told me that her name was, “Corrie ten BOOM!”, as it sounded to me, in her oddly-accented voice with that very loud, “BOOM!” I’d never forget it.
Only later would I realize who she was, and what a Christian testimony she had, in concentration camps and across the world.
She’d tell of her months in solitary confinement under the Nazis, for hiding Jews in a hidden room above her family’s clock shop in the Dutch town of Haarlem. The family’s gratitude for God’s love prompted their risking their lives to hide Jews behind that fake wall upstairs. Many years later, I’d visit that hidden room upstairs.
Corrie, her sister Betsie and their father were arrested and sent to the death camps after their secret “hiding place” was exposed by a Nazi, posturing as a Jew seeking safe shelter. Corrie’s sister and father would die in the camp. Corrie survived her months of solitary confinement and years of physical abuse, and she’d go on to live her testimony of how, even in her solitary confinement, she wasn’t alone, for, “Jesus was with me”, as were even those that she called, “my little friends”, the lice, that so spooked the guards that they kept away from her. This was her perspective on Reality from within her Christian gratitude, even in those Nazi hell holes.
From those late 1940s, I recall a gospel song of gratitude by a Glasgow tram motorman, Seth Sykes and his wife, Bessie. They taught many folks to truly and gratefully want to sing their songs of praise to God for His grace. Here’s their most popular lyric:
“Thank You, Lord, for saving my soul, Thank You, Lord, for making me whole; Thank You, Lord, for giving to me, Thy great salvation, so rich and free.”
In 1953 Ray Boltz was born in Muncie, Indiana. He’d grow up to be a Gospel singer and songwriter. His own “Thank You” lyric became his signature song. I’ve long related to his words, for they remind me of my tutelage under my Sunday School teacher, Johnny Myers, at that German Reformed Church in Youngstown, Ohio. Sadly, that building was demolished long ago in the blight into which my hometown collapsed under the Mafia, the crooked politicians, and LBJ’s “Great Society” restrictions forbidding two-parent households in order for women rearing children to qualify for welfare. Boys without fathers don’t grow up into responsible young men and law-abiding adults. They’re reared by gangs.
Here are the words Ray Boltz wrote for his “Thank You” song:
I dreamed I went to heaven, and you were there with me.
We walked upon the streets of gold, beside the crystal sea.
We heard the angels singing. Then someone called your name,
You turned and saw this young man, and he was smiling as he came.
And he said, friend, you may not know me now. And then he said, but wait,
You used to teach my Sunday School when I was only eight.
And every week you’d say a prayer before the class would start,
And one day when you said that prayer, I asked Jesus into my heart.
CHORUS
Thank you for giving to the Lord. I am a life that was changed.
Thank you for giving to the Lord. I am so glad you gave.
For me, it was Harry D. Clarke’s 1924 hymn, “Into My Heart”, that we sang in that Sunday School of my childhood.
“Into my heart, into my heart, come into my heart, Lord Jesus; come in today, come in to stay, come into my heart, Lord Jesus.
“Out of my heart, out of my heart, shine out of my heart, Lord Jesus; shine out today, shine out always; shine out of my heart, Lord Jesus.
On September 12, 2008, in the gay Washington Blade, Ray Boltz “came out” as gay. He and his whole family, are still family.
He still writes and sings Gospel music, but he’s lost many fans who can’t grasp how he could “go gay”. Maybe God’s Grace had Something to do with it – for sharing, with gays, Christ’s Gospel.
J. Gresham Machen, was another “odd duck” for Christ, reared in an elite family, he was socially awkward. A lifelong bachelor, a biblical scholar, he dedicated his whole life to defending Christian orthodoxy and he founded Westminster Seminary while Princeton Seminary, where he’d taught, was drifting into those sad early 20th Century doldrums of theological “Modernism”, or, as one popular commentator of the day, the atheistic H. L. Mencken, who much respected Machen’s brilliance, badgered: Modernism was turning church into a mere “social club devoted vaguely to good works.”
At just 55, looking “deadly tired”, it was said, Machen took a train to North Dakota to fulfill speaking engagements in 20-below-zero weather. On January 1, 1937, he died there, of pneumonia. His last words were by telegram to his very best friend, theologian John Murray, also a bachelor, saying: “I’m so thankful for active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.” With his last breath, he expressed his gratitude for God’s imputing to him, Christ’s own righteousness, over his own oft-acknowledged unrighteousness.
William Cowper, an earlier “odd duck”, was a very grateful 18th-century hymnwriter and abolitionist. So often misunderstood, yet dearly befriended by John Newton, Cowper was often depressed, sometimes suicidal, always socially-awkward (perhaps autistic), and later it was speculated that he was “a homosexual” merely because he was a bachelor. Well, in thankful confidence, Cowper penned soaring words from his foundational faith and hope: “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”. In summing up our ultimate future with God, Cowper so wisely and gratefully added, in solid Christian assurance: “God is His Own Interpreter, and He will make it plain.” And, thanks be to God, He surely will!