Skip to main content

"On Giving Thanks"


Thanksgiving Is usually one of those ‘easy’ times for me.  It is easy to be thankful living with abundance, in safety, with family and friends – so many things to give thanks for, so many blessings undeserved. Some years and for some people, it is not so. What would Thanksgiving mean to me then? How would I deal with it?

I came across this prayer not long ago ~
          For that which was
          For that which is
          For that which will be
         Thanks be to God

And I began to wonder ~
Is the real meaning behind Thanksgiving not so much the ability to be thankful for those things we have in abundance? After all, that is easy.  But rather to be thankful for everything we have been given or experienced in life, or are now experiencing: the highs and the lows, the mountain-top experiences and the valleys of death, the deserts and the abundant harvests. Not because we are masochists, but because all those things combined together have determined who we are at this moment in time – and God has been present in that transformation and molding of our being: in the words of the doxology, “that power working within us that can do so much more than we can ask for imagine”. That is what I am truly thankful for.

 

As the psalmist says:
Enter God’s gates 
    with thanksgiving
       and the courts with praise.
           Give thanks to God!
                Bless God’s name!




Comments

  1. Terry DranitsarisOctober 9, 2013 at 6:00 PM

    I find myself thankful for many things, not just at Thanksgiving in fact thanking God on a daily basis is what is important to my life. I suppose I could sit down and have a wonderful thanksgiving dinner anytime of the year. I find that I am thankful for the small steps I can make in my day to day life, the gift to be among God's people, to be a part of EfM, to stop and smell the flowers and looking into the sky on a night when the the stars are so bright and the moon is shining in a brighter hue, I thank God for life and birth and rebirth, for His love in allowing me to still be able to some small task to perhaps help others , I thank Our Creator for His son who gave his life for us. Thanksgiving can come in many ways and facets of life. I have so much to be thankful for I can't begin to count them all. Thanksgiving is a nice celebration but it has a much broader meaning to me then having a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. It is being with friends and family and thanking God for all he has done for us... I really like this post. Thank you for sharing. And thanks be to God.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lynn EdwardOctober 9, 2013 at 6:54 PM

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Terry.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 14, 2013 at 10:39 AM

    Thanks for your post. I think the act of giving thanks is part of the fabric of our life insofar as it is relational in nature. We give thanks to God for life and we thank other people every day in ordinary transactions. Perhaps giving thanks reveals that when all is said and done we are interdependent on each other for life and when we act otherwise we are reflecting arrogance about our place in creation.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lynn EdwardOctober 14, 2013 at 2:04 PM

    I like where this thought has taken me. Thank you! Thanksgiving should be about thanking those PEOPLE who have impacted on our lives, not about giving thanks for the THINGS we enjoy. For example, instead of giving thanks for health, we should be saying 'thank you' to the doctor who made it possible. Instead of being focused on the material goods we have, the real focus should be on our need for each other and where that has been met in our lives.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This, too ...

  ‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.’   -Hebrews 11:8  Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, says this, too, will pass . Dr. Eileen de Villa, Medical Official of Health for Toronto, says this, too, will pass . Justin Trudeau , Prime Minister of Canada, says this, too, will pass . But will it really??? Some days this feels like an unending struggle with just one tiny step forward and not just two, but more like a dozen steps back.  Of course I’m talking about COVID-19 with all its associated variants. We might even be forgiven for rewriting that well known quote from Ecclesiastes to read…. For everything there is a season,…but  just not for this ! Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest,  might well have been talking about COVID   when he penned the lines below: We should like to skip  The ...
1 comment
Read more

Challenging Faith

“All giving constitutes a challenge to faith because there is no guarantee of a return.” When I heard this statement as part of a sermon on Rogation Sunday, my ears pricked up and my mind started to spin. The rest of the sermon had things to say as well, but this sentence is still the one that has stuck with me. It made, and is still making me think! For those of us who identify ourselves with the church, whenever we hear the word ‘givings’ our minds go immediately to what we put on the offering plate each Sunday and for that we expect, but are not guaranteed, that the church will be there for us when we need it; for weddings, baptisms, funerals and other rites of passage. However what intrigues me about this quotation is that first word. “ ALL giving constitutes a challenge …” And how true it is! Each time we ‘give’ something away and it doesn’t have the expected return, it is upsetting and we have all had that experience. I remember many years ago s...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Property of Jesus"

Have you seen people wearing shirts that say "Property of Jesus"  Perhaps you have seen them for sale in a Christian book store? Have you stopped to consider just what that motto says about the wearer, or more importantly just what it might say about you? 'Property' in a business dictionary, is defined as: " Quality or thing owned or possessed . In Law: Article, item, or thing owned with the rights of possession, use, and enjoyment,...  " So if we are the property of another, then they have complete control over us. We are in fact their slave . According to the dictionary, a slave is " someone who is legally owned by another person and is forced to work for that person without pay ; a person who is strongly influenced and controlled " I wonder if the persons wearing these shirts ever consider what they are actually proclaiming? If in fact they are the 'Property of Jesus', does that not mean that they have no choic...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Allegory

Once upon a time there was a knight and his lady, who lived contently for many years in a southern kingdom. As they aged however, their manor became too big for them and so they decided to relocate in a northern kingdom where smaller quarters were available. They left their friends of many years with a sad good-bye and set off for new adventures. They settled quite happily in their new abode, and joined in all the activities and merry-making until one day, they had to drop out of some of the activities because of their declining years.  No one came to ask them why they were no longer taking part. Instead the rest of the folk in that kingdom ignored them and it became very lonely for the knight and his lady The king suggested that they might be happier is a neighbouring kingdom and so they moved a short distance and set up house one more time.  This time though things went well for many years.  Then the king died. The heir apparent had many different ideas about what ...
2 comments
Read more

But that's NOT what I meant!

35 years ago now, when I was going to university, I remember having my essays read by someone who I trusted both for their knowledge of English grammar and for the subject matter. I can also remember saying on more than one occasion when looking over their suggestions for changes, ‘But that’s NOT what I meant!’ Somehow I felt that the validity of my ideas was being challenged. I had long ago forgotten about these exchanges, but they came to the forefront of my thoughts again this past week. Thinking about them from a distance, I now believe that my editor wasn’t deliberately changing my thoughts but rather was just putting what they perceived as the meaning I was trying to make into better grammar. At the time, however I saw it as an attempt to actually change the meaning. And how often this happens to us in our daily lives. Someone reads this blog and really likes it because it said …. and I have to go back to the written word to look at it again because I don’t remember hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hope springs eternal....

The season of Advent starts this coming Sunday, the beginning of the church year. I have decided to do something a little different and so for the next 4 weeks, I will be reflecting about a different verse in a well-known Advent hymn.  Each Sunday in Advent, a candle in the advent wreath is lit in our homes and during our worship services. The lighting of the candle is usually accompanied by readings and/or singing. Here is the first verse of  " A Candle is Burning ", with words by Sandra Dean and sung to the familiar tune of "Away in a Manger" .  " A candle is burning, a flame warm and bright, A candle of HOPE in November's dark night While angels sing blessings from heaven's starry sky, Our hearts we prepare now for Jesus is nigh " Or as Desmond Tutu said, "Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness." As the days in the northern hemisphere grow darker with the shortest day of the year o...
Post a Comment
Read more

"A Leap of Faith"

"Leap of faith - yes, but only after reflection"        -  Søren  Kierkegaard "Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the absurd: Job gets everything back again by the virtue of the absurd (Repetition); Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac, by virtue of the absurd (Fear and Trembling); Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their engagement, by virtue of the absurd (Journals); ... the Christian God is represented as absolutely transcendent of human categories yet is absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love, judge, forgiver, teach, etc."  (ex cerpt from   Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - emphasis mine) Just what does Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’ mean . . . especially if we consider that,   as he also postulates,  religion is ‘absurd’ [or as the dictionary says, ’ inconsisten...
3 comments
Read more

Another Road

“And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they [the Magi] left for their own country by another road.” Matthew 2:12  NRSV Just the other day I was out with a friend. As we were leaving to go home we decided ‘go by another road’ and the comment was made about how biblical that was. But as I heard the preacher’s opening to their sermon this past week, suddenly I had a very different understanding of just what those words meant in the context of the story of the magi. One might say I had an epiphany! We don’t know anything about who wrote the gospels or even when or why the gospels were written. We can surmise that the authors were writing down these stories in an attempt to pass on the transformative effect the life and teachings of Jesus had had on their lives and perhaps the lives of others around them. So I have come to understand the two birth narratives to be an attempt to rewrite his birth showing this importance. As angels sang, he was revered by t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Voices

‘ We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.’ -Malala Yousafzai What difference can one person [or one voice] make? That is a question I hear repeated over and over. We feel so helpless, so powerless in the face of whatever tragedy has befallen, whatever need there is. I know. I’ve been there nightly watching the human suffering on the TV news as I’ve seen the women and children huddling in the rubble hoping to escape from the next blast, the appalling conditions on our own reservations where again the children are doing without the necessities of life. ‘How can this be?”, I ask myself and feel even more hopeless.  With all the focus on the Syrian refugee crisis in the news recently, my mind has gone back some 37 years to 1978 when I was part of a group that sponsored a boat family. In fact over the next 6 or 7 years that same group sponsored 27 people, at four different times, coming from Vietnam and South America. I clearly recall at ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Resurrection???

I heard a ‘Resurrection Story’ this week …  A computer had refused to turn on and so it was taken to the computer doctor. After a number of days the message was received that the computer had died and please come and pick up the ‘body’ for burial. However once it was safely home again, the owner decided that the computer could be resurrected with the help of running the ‘restore’ disc and some loving care. Now I would like to be able to say this story had a happy ending, but alas the next day found the owner in a store buying a new hard drive to replace the one that had died! So why do I call this a Resurrection Story? Because even with the new hard drive installed and the old one gone,  those things that had been learned with the old will continue to be part of the new.  The core of the ‘Resurrection story’ we will hear read from the Gospel and likely at least to be referenced in the sermon preached from the pulpit on Easter Sunday talks of the bodily resur...
Post a Comment
Read more