“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.”
– 1 Chronicles 16:34

We need Thanksgiving. We need it desperately.

As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, we’ll have our minds squarely focused on the most important stuff — family, God, each other, and, more secretly (though more honestly), what we hope to acquire during the next six weeks. Slowly, our satisfaction with being with people we love fades and the longing for things-wanted morphs into a dangerous entitlement for things-needed. We’ll face the temptation to replace the miraculous God-come-near story of Christmas with the miraculously low “door busting” prices of black Friday, small business Saturday, and the recent addition to the shopping frenzy, “Cyber Monday.”

While our hearts begin in the right place, we’ll start wondering if all those people — our family — are thinking about us with our same unhindered altruism. They should be like us. We, in our shopping are only thinking about them, their needs. Our hope, though we never vocalize it, is that they would brave the same crowds and fight the same ascending debt-stress on our behalf  that we do for them, all in hopes of that they would buy for us our invariably needed thing that we can’t live without.

Certainly, we can’t act like we need it (whatever it is). Therein lies the art of it all. We clearly don’t want to start sounding like Ralphie from A Christmas Story. No, we’re much more subtle than he could ever dream. We won’t rattle off the specifics about the thing that we have to have. We won’t be talking about “Red Rider 200-shot range model air rifles, with a compass in the stock…” No, we don’t need anything, we’ll say. We’re just glad to be with our family. We’re grateful for what we already have. And, then we’ll start trying to figure out how we’ll live with disappointment. We counsel ourselves into dealing with people who let us down year after year. We’ll begin a speedy descent into resentment. And, before we even hit Christmas, we’re already bitter about not having something that may or may not have been purchased for us. But, that’s not what we want. We never intend that kind of thinking to be our thinking. We need a real lasting remedy for that insanity.

This weekend is going to be one of the most critical for our souls. We’re going to peer into the next few weeks, arming ourselves, not with greater patience for unruly shoppers, nor with with greater dedication to finding good deals. No, we’ll arm ourselves with the one thing the world wants to rob us of during this season, the one thing that frees us from that “spiral of want” — gratitude, because we need it, desperately.

I love meeting all of the people you’re continuing to include in our church community. I’m looking forward to another great Sunday together at Mariners MV.

– Jeff