Beyond Just Thankful to Real Thanksgiving ... This Season and Beyond

Thanksgiving may be the last truly "religious" holiday that is still, dare I say widely, celebrated for its true meaning in our country.  While our post-Christian, post-modern culture has all but divorced the Incarnation from Christmas and the Resurrection from Easter, this last holdout holiday is still hanging on ... but just barely, really.  With the Macy's and other Thanksgiving Day parades on TV in the morning to the NFL games [now up to three in number] sequenced just about back to back to back in the afternoon and evening to the Black Friday sales actually now encroaching on the very Thanksgiving Day itself, it's future is just about as grim as the two holidays that have already succumbed to the culture over the past forty to fifty years.  But that doesn't mean that it should go down without a fight.  And not the kind of fight most people would expect to wage.  No ... this is a fight that begins in our hearts and ends on our knees ... with bands of our dearest friends and families encircled around us.  This is the true battle for Thanksgiving.

Our culture may be ceding a small amount of ground here and some might even say that gratitude is making a bit of a comeback with secular academics and self-help gurus publishing both papers and books on the psychological benefits of thankfulness.  Even the New York Times referred to Thanksgiving as "the most psychologically correct holiday of the year" back in 2011.  Even Oprah, America's high priestess of secularism, keeps a gratitude journal and recommends the practice, saying that thankfulness "changes your personal vibration."  As a result, many Americans are getting on board, trying to stop their complaining and start counting their blessings ... at least for one day of the year.

I think we can all agree that gratitude is healthy.  It is largely undeniable that cultivating a mindset of "wanting what you have" -- what my grandparent's generation would have called "contentment" -- will greatly enhance one's life and even increase one's level of happiness.  And beyond that, it is an excellent antidote to the insatiable materialism that infects so many of us.  But mere contentment, an appreciation for the things that one has, is not enough.  Because while gratitude is certainly a good place to start, feeling thankful is not quite the same thing as true thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving differs from gratitude in one major respect:  it requires an object for our thanks.  There must be a Giver to whom we actually give thanks, and whom we acknowledge as the source of our gifts.  Unless we can bring ourselves to offer true thanksgiving to the Giver of our blessings, our gratitude, contentment and even happiness rests on unsettled ground.

Let's be totally honest about life for a few minutes.  Yes, it is full of blessings, breathtakingly so at times.  Yet most of us fail to see the beauty that surrounds us most of the time.  Just going outside two weeks ago to gaze at the grandeur of the full moon ... how many of us did that?  Or were we just too busy?  When was the last time we put our cell phones down and turned off Facebook or our e-mail accounts to just hold and peer into the eyes of one our children or grandchildren?  Or when was the last time we appreciated what a lavish gift our sense of taste was as we sipped our morning coffee?  These are among the myriad of gifts and joys that are just glimpses of God's abundant goodness to us that are everywhere, if we would just take time to stop and look.  Life is truly beautiful.

Yet as we have seen in Tallahassee over the past week, life can also be terribly tragic.  This same creation that God definitively declared as "good," He later declared cursed; and that goodness and that curse have been at war with one another since on the battleground of our daily lives.  Like the three FSU students shot in the Strozier Library last week or the Leon County Sheriff's Deputy gunned down on Saturday trying to help what he thought were victims of a house fire, very few of  us will escape this life without some deep sorrow to wrench our gut or break our hearts.

I am not speaking of life's petty annoyances like seemingly missing every traffic light between my home and my office on a daily basis, or the frustrations inherent in using a clunky electronic medical record or even being called by the airline and having our vacation flight cancelled the day before we were to depart for a much awaited Christmas holiday at the ski resort.  I am referring to the fact the people we love, like my third daughter Ariel, nearly being torn from our lives in an auto accident on the turnpike in Orlando last weekend.  Or friends learning almost out of the blue that they have cancer and won't recover.  Even the glories of nature can be transformed into irresistible terror when a tornado drops out of the sky or an earthquake suddenly rumbles or even a tsunami rages.  But even those of us who manage to avoid life's major calamities will see our children grow up and eventually leave us.  Our bodies grow old and break down.  Eventually, every single item on our "list of blessings" will be stripped away from us.  And even though we understand that this is the "natural order of things," there remains an accompanying sadness that all the positive thinking in the world cannot quite erase.

There can really only be one reason for this.  We were meant to live forever.  That was God's original design for humanity when he put us in the garden oh so many millennia ago.  And even now, after so many generations of living under the curse that sin brought upon us, we still long for immortality.  It is far too simple to just say that "death is a natural part of life, and that we should just count our blessings and be grateful for the time we have on this earth."  We can do that but it won't stop our souls from craving the eternal.  We somehow inherently know that something is very wrong about death ... that it was never meant to be the natural ending of things.

And that is where thanksgiving ... good old-fashioned, Christian Thanksgiving ... can truly help us.  While gratitude based on temporal things will eventually fail us, Thanksgiving, as originally established by our Pilgrim forefathers, is an act of communion with the eternal God.  And as such, it serves to anchor us to something that will last forever.

God's very Word declares that His love is from everlasting to everlasting.  It is the one thing that we can never lose.  "'Though the mountains be shaken and the hills removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken, nor my covenant of peace removed,' says the Lord, who has compassion on you" [Isaiah 54:10].  The story only gets better with the new covenant when God sent His very Son to live, die and then rise again for us, breaking the curse of sin and restoring our hope of eternal life.  Now we can look at the beauties and joys of life not simply as blessings that we will eventually lose, but rather as glimpses of the joy and beauty which through the power of Christ can never truly be taken from us.  And we can offer thanks, turning our gaze from the gift itself to its very Giver.

And this is what that small, bedraggled band of Puritans understood on the first American Thanksgiving nearly 400 years ago.  They certainly were no strangers to sorrow.  Persecuted for their faith and driven from their native country, they had survived a hellish sea voyage only to arrive in New England just in time for a brutal winter.  Governor William Bradford described what followed:  "In two or three months' time half of their company died, partly owing to the severity of the winter ... and the want of houses and other comforts; partly to scurvy and other diseases, which their long voyage and their incommodious quarters had brought upon them.  Of all the hundred odd persons, scarcely fifty remained, and sometimes two or three persons died in a single day."

Yet just three months later, this is how survivor Edward Winslow described the celebration that we know as the First Thanksgiving:  "... for three days we entertained and feasted ... And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want."

It is true that the residents of Plymouth Plantation were rejoicing in a good harvest.  But if that had been their primary source of joy, it would have been a poor recompense for the immense suffering they had just been through ... not to mention all that was yet to come.  They knew full well that material blessings can be fleeting.  "So uncertain are the mutable things of this unstable world!" Bradford later wrote.  "And yet men set their hearts upon them, though they daily see their vanity."

No, the thing that sustained these men and women was not the harvest itself.  Rather, it was the unchanging, never-ending goodness of God, of which the harvest was just one small manifestation.  So this Thanksgiving let us give thanks for the blessings that fill our daily lives:  a wife, our children, the spouses of our children, our grandchildren, a home, health, freedom and the let us also recognize that each day that we have these things is an undeserved gift.  But beyond all of this, we can and should thank God for the one thing we can never lose:  Himself, His love and the salvation for which His Son the Christ paid the ultimate price.  And we look forward to that day, which is surely coming, when His goodness will fully overcome the curse, and every tear will be wiped away from every eye.