This story is taken from my new book, The Stories of My Life, available at St. Andrews Baptist Church in Columbia, SC and "soon," I am promised, at Amazon.com. I hope this story adds to the meaning of your Thanksgiving celebration.
Where
are Your Blessings?
(1
Peter 4:10-11) Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in
its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very
words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides,
so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the
glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.
When
I hear the word “Thanksgiving,” it opens a family album of memories. In my growing up home, Thanksgiving Day was a
holiday, almost a holy day, filled with many routines and rituals. Amid those memories, I learned the true
meaning of thanksgiving.
Most
of the Thanksgiving morning was spent in the front yard raking some of the
ocean of leaves that fell from the oak tree that towers over my home
place. We raked those leaves partly to
clean up the yard and partly to keep us out of the house so that more important
and more delicious work could be done without interruption or unsolicited
taste-testing.
Before
we were sent to the yard, however, there were several things that had to be
done to prepare the way for the Thanksgiving meal. Our home didn’t have a dining room as such,
so on Thanksgiving Day we would pick up the table from the kitchen and carry it
into the den, making it our banquet hall for the day. Only on Thanksgiving, both leaves were added
to the table to make room for lots of people and lots of food. The table clothes would be put in place.
And
then, someone would be sent to the corner of the room to a lawyer’s bookcase
with glass doors that my dad had found and refinished and given to mom as a
kind of china cabinet. On those shelves
were the good dishes, the fine china, a set that my parents had received from
friends to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. Thanksgiving Day was one of the very few days
that bookcase was opened or even touched.
It was, in my house, a bit like the Ark of the Covenant. Those who touched it without a high and holy
calling might just end up dead. There
was something very special, something almost sacramental about bringing out
those good plates for Thanksgiving dinner.
When everything was ready, the yard crew, myself included, would be
called in, cleaned up, and invited to the table.
When
everyone was in place, Dad would say a special prayer. His mealtime prayers were always good, but
everyday meals often got everyday prayers that sounded a lot alike. But this prayer was anything but
routine. This was a time to think and to
thank. I always listened to those
prayers as though they were a State of the Family address.
I
remember my brother Barry’s strange and sad food choices. With a feast before him, he would make a
Thanksgiving meal of turnip greens (no vinegar), white rice (no gravy), and
pickles (no food allowed to touch the others).
How he ended up in the food industry is a mystery to me!
And
then there was mom’s dressing. To
paraphrase the old spiritual that says “take the whole world, just give me
Jesus:” take the whole meal, just give me
dressing.
We
ate. We talked. We laughed.
We teased. We shared a great time
over the good dishes on Thanksgiving Day.
But they weren’t with us for long.
As soon as the meal was over, we cleaned them carefully, washed and
dried them by hand, stacked them neatly, and closed them up in the bookcase
china cabinet. There they stayed,
untouched, unused, almost forgotten until the next Thanksgiving.
Flip
a few pages in that album of memories to another Thanksgiving Day at my home
place. In many ways it was the same as
the others—the moving of the table, the adding of the table leaves, the
dressing, the good dishes. But this
Thanksgiving was different too. Someone
was missing. Dad wasn’t there. When we sat down for the meal that day, we
joined hands and waited in silence as though he would deliver the Thanksgiving
blessing from heaven. Barry, my brother,
finally jumped in and blessed the food.
For once, the family preacher couldn’t find a word to say.
After
the meal and the cleanup and some family pictures, and sort of watching the
football game on television, I left the rest of my family and went downstairs
into the basement. Halfway down the
stairs, I sat down and looked around at what had been my father’s workshop.
As
a child, I’d seen him at work in that place and believed that he could do just
about anything. After a few years of
adolescent blindness, I’d come to realize that I was just about right. He made our first basketball goal in that
workshop. He made beautiful wooden
cornices to go atop the windows in our den.
He often took an electric motor apart, replaced and refurbished parts
and put it back together as good as new.
(I can still judge the health of an electric motor by hearing it
run.) He could take my wildest idea for
a school project and bring it to life.
Now,
for the first time ever, his workshop was silent. His tools were idle. I could hardly stand it. Almost by reflex, I
moved to the bottom of the stairs, across to the workbench and began piddling
(as he called it) with one of the unfinished projects that sat there as though
they were observing a time of mourning.
I picked up some of his tools. I
knew where most of them were. I can’t
say that I was accomplishing much of anything.
Still, it felt good. It felt
right. Tools are meant to be used. Tools are meant to work. I liked hearing a little noise in the
workshop again.
As
I worked a little in my Father’s workshop that Thanksgiving Day, something
began to dawn in my heart. There in the
basement of the house where I grew up, surrounded by tools and parts and
unfinished projects and memories, God taught me a lesson that forever changed
my understanding of what living a thankful life is all about.
God
began to ask me, Where are your
blessings? Are they in your china
cabinet or in my workshop? That day
I began to see that there are two very different ways of looking at life—two
very different ways of understanding life’s blessings—two very different ways
of living a thankful life.
One
is the way of the china cabinet. In this
way of living you see God’s blessings as precious gifts to be protected and
preserved. Like my parents’ good dishes,
you bring your blessings out into the open on special days to see them, to name
them, to count them, to give thanks for them.
But then you clean them up and put them back in that safe place unused,
untouched, almost forgotten.
This
way of living doesn’t work. It leaves
you as spiritually hungry as a thanksgiving dinner without mom’s dressing. Something inside us knows that counting our
blessings and then somehow safely storing them away is as wrong as counting
your money in front of a person in need but not using any of it to help
them. I began to see that, for the
Christian, thanksgiving doesn’t happen in a china cabinet.
The
more faithful way is the way of the workshop.
When you live a thankful life in a workshop kind of way, you see that God’s
blessings are not so much treasures to be kept as they are tools to be used to
love others and glorify Him. Learning
this lesson, 1 Peter 4:10 became my most
faithful scriptural guide for living a truly thankful Christian life:
(1 Peter 4:10) Each one should use
whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's
grace in its various forms.
The truly Christian way to give thanks and to live a
thankful life is not the china cabinet way, but the workshop way. And once you know that, once you decide to
live that, you never see God’s blessings in the same way. The workshop way to
thank God that I can read is to teach a child to read for themselves or read to
an older person who can no longer see the words. The workshop way to thank God for my health
is to respect my body as a temple of the Holy Spirit and use my strength to
lift up those who are weak. The workshop
way to give thanks for this nation is to exalt it through righteous living and
to use our freedoms not to indulge ourselves but to glorify God. The workshop way to give thanks for my family
is to open that circle enough to share with someone who doesn’t have a
family. The workshop way to give thanks
for our church is to roll up our sleeves and work hard to keep it strong and
see it grow. The workshop way to give thanks for my salvation is to tell the
story of what Christ has done for me and to do all that I can to help someone
else know Jesus. The workshop way
multiplies the blessings in your life because you not only have the gift; you
have the smile of the Giver and the joy of changing the world.
Where are your blessings? Are they counted, cherished, but safely, even
selfishly stored away? Or are they tools in God’s workshop, serving others, and bringing glory
to His name? Lives will be changed,
beginning with yours, when you get your blessings out of the china cabinet and
into God’s workshop where they belong.
