A Thanksgiving Meditation

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and our Colorado children, spouses/boyfriend (we consider them our kids, too) and our grandson will be coming over for dinner which I am looking forward to.  I always enjoy our family times and I am thankful to God for them.

This morning at work for the college that it is my privilege to serve, one of our work study students brought me a sheet of colored construction paper and asked me to trace my hand on it and then write what I was thankful for on it and attach it to a construction paper turkey on the marker board in our hallway.  Now I have to confess that I wasn't feeling particularly thankful to God at the time so it took me a while of pondering to come up with some ideas.  And then I started feeling thankful to God for them as I thought about them.  And so I have been mulling over thankfulness today.

Now the original Thanksgiving was declared to offer thanks to God for His provisions for them during some tough times.

But a lot of us have a hard time being naturally thankful to God, including me at times.  It seems like lots of times we find it easier to blame Him.  The Apostle Paul brings that up in his letter to the Romans chapter one as he is laying out God's list of grievances with mankind.  In verse 21, he says "they did not honor him as God or give thanks to Him" NRSVCE.  And I think it is this natural ingratitude towards God that is at the root of a lot of today's ills and much of our unhappiness.

But there is help for a naturally ungrateful cuss like me in the Scriptures, the prayers of the Church, the Psalms, the hymns and the spiritual songs (see Ephesians 5:15-20 and Colossians 3:12-17) and the Mass, which is one big prayer of thanksgiving.

I love the Mass.  One of my favorite parts is in the Preface Dialogue where the priest says, "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God."  And our response is "It is right and just."  And then the priest launches into the Preface, "It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God, through Christ our Lord."  And then the priest goes on to list a bunch of reasons why it is right and just to give God thanks, according to the liturgical season of the year.  Notice that his prayer says that not only does God deserve our thanks but in the giving of thanks to Him, we find our salvation.

And I experienced that tonight as I was cleaning up the kitchen and these words from the Mass came back to me and I said them over and over to the Lord, my God.  My heart became full of joy and peace and gratitude.  I was renewed in heart and mind.

May you all have a blessed Thanksgiving.










 

The Knowledge and Experience of God - Both are needed.

This past Sunday my wife, Joan, and I were standing in Plum Creek Church singing Kristian Stanfill's song, One Thing Remains.  It is an awesome song!  I especially love the chorus which speaks of God's love for us, "Your love never fails, it never gives up, it never runs out on me...".  Tears of joy and thankfulness were running down my face as we sang the song.  Now this emotional response was triggered because the song resonated with both my knowledge and experience.  Sometimes songs resonate with my longings for God and aspirations to be the man He wants me to be for His glory and for my fellow brothers and sisters who trod this globe with me.

As I was thinking about this song, the passage from John 5:39-40 was brought to mind where Jesus says in answer to His critics among His own people, "You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."  The Scriptures give us the knowledge/witness of Jesus but in order to really have life we need to come to Him.  Jesus draws a distinction between the Scriptures and Himself.  But it is not an either/or distinction but rather a both/and distinction.  In other words, we need both.  The knowledge (Scriptures and Creation (see Romans 1)) and experience (shared life together with (see John 17)) of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

So how do we get both knowledge and experience of God?  That will be the subject of my next post or two.