A Thanks Giving Meditation

(Read Psalm 23)

Thanksgiving. For many, Thanksgiving represents a little more than the beginning of the busy, mad-dash towards Christmas.  We briefly recognize the struggles of the Pilgrims who landed on an alien shore with dangers and challenges at every corner.  After an extremely difficult and costly beginning, they reaped a harvest and gave thanks for the LORD’s provision.  

Giving thanks to God is a completely normal, natural, and frequent response for Christians.  We recognize that everything we have, everything we enjoy, everything that benefits us has some hint of the Creator’s hand.  He is our Jehovah Jirah, God our Provider.  

I’ve noticed three occasions on which we, as God’s Children, give thanks to our Heavenly Father.

The first occasion is when we are given some blessing that we never even asked for.  God is such a rich and loving Father that there are times in our lives where He seems to just love to bless us with an unexpected bonus from work, an out of the blue encouraging word from an old friend, a surprise gift, or something as simple as a beautiful sunset.  I’m sure we all have stories we can tell about that one time that God simply floored us with His goodness, benevolence, and provision without our even having a need.

The second situation we often give thanks is when God directly answers our prayer for a deeply felt need.  He assures us in the scriptures that He knows what we need before we even ask.  The times in my life when He specifically answers my prayer, when I look back after I’ve received the answer, I can often see that God started answering it before I even asked; the domino effect began weeks, months, or sometimes even years before in such a way that it can be not good fortune, or simple accident that I received His answer at my time of greatest need.

My mom tells the story of how a friend was between paychecks, her savings account had recently been depleted due to an emergency with her children and to top everything off her refrigerator died on her.  She had to have a refrigerator.  My mom’s friend turned her eyes to the LORD and said, “LORD.  You know I need a refrigerator and there’s nothing I can do about it.  Please.  Help.”  She asked her friends to pray and within a day a free refrigerator was delivered.  After delivery she called my mom and praised the LORD for His answer.  She added, however, that next time she needed to be more specific in her prayers.  The Robin’s Egg Blue walls of her kitchen didn’t compliment the new-to-her 70’s, Avocado Green fridge.  

These are the kinds of stories we can’t wait to tell about the Lord and share with one another.  “God blessed me when I didn’t even have a need.”  “God intervened when I didn’t know how I was going to get what I needed.”  These praises are immensely important to share.  We encourage one another with these reflections of joy on who God is and what He does.

The third cause of thanks giving often makes us uncomfortable.  In some ways we’d maybe like to forget they happened at all. 

We often forget that when the Pilgrims celebrated that first Thanksgiving, they had come through a dark and terrible winter.  Half of the members died from starvation, disease, or simply the cold.  Around that First Thanksgiving table were 55 mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers who knew who wasn’t there, who saw empty chairs where their loved ones should have been.  One of the most affecting images I’ve seen is a graphic on the internet that shows the outlined figures of the people who stepped off the Mayflower as family groups.  Those that didn’t survive the winter were greyed out, and the survivors left in full detail.  The Deadly Winter took whole families, and there is one image that I think about every holiday season of a family of 5 and only the youngest survived.  The tiniest figure remains in bold detail while the rest are in a ghostly grey.

And yet they praised God.  They THANKED Him for His goodness, His provision, His loving-kindness.  I’d like to believe that my faith is strong, but if all my family died due to disease or cold…my first thought would not be to thank God.

We all have a story like this.  We all have endured tragedies, difficulties, struggles, and loss.  Whether it was something we have done or something that was done to us, we have all gone through a dark time of suffering and trial.  And the LORD was there, whether we saw Him in the moment or the circumstances or not.  And the LORD brought us to or brought to us the right people at the right time to help us, or the right scripture to guide us through, and come out the other side.  

If you’re in the moment, if you’re doubting God’s provision, or if you’re still in the process I want to remind you of the 23rd Psalm.  “Valley of the shadow of death”…. There is a valley of the shadow of death…there is an evil…But He is there and so there is no reason to fear.  

When David later talks about the LORD preparing a table for him in the midst of his enemies, we forget how ridiculous that image is.  There are going to be enemies, whether actual physical, or psychological or spiritual, he doesn’t deny the presence of enemies.  God’s presence doesn’t mean that there are no enemies who want David straight up dead.  Actually dead.  

But he says that God’s provision is such that…imagine this for a moment, see how ridiculous this is. 

Imagine a flat, grassy plane, and in the middle of it, surrounded by well armed people who want David murdered, there’s a table with a nice, crisp white linen table cloth, all the silver ware, fancy china, wine glass, water class, a napkin folded in the shape of a swan, a bottle of white wine in a bucket of ice, a mahogany sideboard with silver domes under which there is a gourmet four course meal ready and waiting, and a waiter in a tux with a white towel draped over his arm lighting the candles.  That is the table prepared for him in the midst of David’s enemies.  It isn’t in David’s well appointed tent, or in his comfy palace.  It’s on the battle field, in the darkest, most dangerous place David could find himself.  

In the middle of our darkest past or darkest present, He has provision and blessing for us.  Through emotional winter, through disease, through our spiritual starving times…He is there and we can give thanks.

If you have already been through the Valley of the Shadow of Death holding His capable hands, if you’ve experienced God’s 5 star restaurant in the middle of swarms of enemies, the most important thing you can do is share what God has done.  “God got me a thing I asked Him for” is an encouraging report.  I don’t discount it one bit.  But there is something fundamentally more affecting when we share how God was there and brought us through the dark times.  I’ve said before that one of the most amazing things about God is that He can take something that’s been shattered, put it back together again and cause it to be more beautiful than it was before, more effective than it was before, and better than before the shattering.  No human psychology can do that.  No power of positive thinking can accomplish that feat.  It is wholly supernatural.  Only God can redeem something like that. 

So often we feel ashamed that we were in darkness, that we had a loss, that we suffered or struggled at all and that tends to silence us.   Your Brothers and Sisters, and the World needs to hear that story, that testimony of God’s goodness.  They need to hear what God did for you in the depths of winter. They need to hear very clearly your THANKSGIVING.