For most of us, Thanksgiving and Christmas won’t be quite the same again this year. Bill and I were together alone last year because of Covid-19. Travel was restricted and large gatherings of any kind was discouraged.
The big gathering we’ve always had on Thanksgiving, usually with forty or more family and friends, circled around our big kitchen with its central island groaning with bounty, will not be happening. We will not be reading “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers”. Our ceremony of the youngest child passing around a tiny basket of grains of Indian corn so each person can in turn return their kernel and tell what he or she is most thankful for since we were last in this circle will have to be celebrated in small family groups in separate homes.
The journey back home for Christmas might not be worth the risk of air travel, especially for those most vulnerable. Many families have lost in the last year some of the generation that would have called us back home. Some families have fractured because the center did not hold.
War and pandemics and elections do not cause the crumbling of safe harbors. It is the erosions of the heart, the fraying of the cables that hold the ship tethered to the pier. Disturbances that shake the foundations only reveal the fissures and the fractures that were there all along behind the plaster and façade. Troubling times demand an inventory of the footings and foundations. Circumstances may come like a storm, but if the moorings hold, if the foundations are strong, we will stand.
So maybe this is the time to strengthen the cables and give loving care to the ties that bind. It is certainly a time to prioritize, because, as someone has so ably said, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The institutions and systems of this world are not the main thing. Kings and kingdoms will all pass away; these are not where our eternal citizenships lie. Often things in which we invest our time and energies, our finances and allegiances, the things that drain our emotional and physical resources—when we ask ourselves at the end of an exhausting day, “Was there any eternity in it?” we are hard fixed to come up with a list of what we did that really mattered.
It helps me to remind myself that gratitude helps my perspective. There is no greater preventative for cynicism than to focus on the blessings of simple things in regular days, things I tend to take for granted because they are so regular. These things are not insignificant; they are the main thing.
There is a new song that Bill and Gerald Crab wrote for the new Christmas Vocal Band project. The song focuses on a couple of real life situations that, like most circumstances, seem to be so in our faces that they eclipse all the rest of life. A dime held close enough to our eye can cover the moon. We’ve all been there. In our desperation we feel as if God is a million miles away. As the song says, our prayer comes out, “Come on down, please Jesus, come on down. Heal this broken world and make it right!”
God hears our desperate cries—about our circumstances, about the crazy world, about things beyond our power to affect. Yet, when we get quiet enough to hear, Jesus whispers to our tired spirits, “I did come down. And I never left. I am with you always, even until the end of this world.”
Then comes a renewed sense of gratitude, and a clearer recognition of our Father’s loving message posted all around us. The corny old chorus doesn’t seem so corny after all.
Count your blessings; name them one by one.
Count your blessings; see what God has done.
Count your blessings. Name them. One. By. One.
Count your many blessings; see what God has done.
“Rest in You Tonight” is available on the Gaither Vocal Band’s new CD/DVD All Heaven and Nature Sing. Purchase or listen HERE.