Where Are Your Blessings?

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 25^th 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.