I awoke this morning to a phone inbox full of multiple mass-text messages saying things like, “Happy Thanksgiving! I’m so thankful for you!” and other similar things. Facebook didn’t waver much from the same with status after status saying things about thankfulness. About being thankful for time with family, being thankful for time with friends, being thankful for the tryptophan in turkey so that instead of staying awake and suffering for the amount of gluttony that took place, we can simply lay back and let the wondrous affects of the massive bird wash a comforting sleep over us.
And Thanksgiving is a wonderful time. We live in a society so immersed in consumerism and self-satiation that we ought to set aside time to be thankful for all the stuff we have. I mean, I’m going to school for free due to scholarships and wonderful parents (thanks, Mom and Dad!). I get good grades, I’ve got a nice car, I’ve got warm clothes for the bitter Lubbock weather, and today I’m going to stuff myself silly with turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. I have so much to be thankful for. So much to comfort me and make me feel safe.
But as we send out our text messages and make our phone calls and type out our Facebook statuses, I can’t help but think of people who look at these things and can only scoff. People who look at thankfulness and question what in the world it is that we think we’re playing at. A mother who had her only son die three days ago in a horrific car accident caused by a drunk driver; a single father of three beautiful children who was told yesterday that he has terminal cancer; a boy at the age of 8 watching his father hit his mother again and again, just closing his eyes and hoping it will all go away someday. What do they have to be thankful for?
I imagine that mother who lost her son waking up on Thanksgiving and receiving a text message and just settling her head back into the tear-stained pillow. I imagine the guilt-ridden father who realized that he just beat his wife in front of his only son looking at that Facebook status and throwing the computer across the room in agony and self-loathing. I imagine the oldest child of that father with terminal cancer falling down on her knees and cursing the doctors, cursing the world, cursing God for not saving her father.
Thankfulness is not an easy thing in a broken world.
The other day I was struck by a blog written by my friend Kyle Bullock (see www.kb-atwitsend.blogspot.com). The blog entry spoke about his time volunteering with underprivileged kids who have horrible home lives and have the worst soul-scars imaginable. A girl who bites herself just to get someone to see that she’s not invisible. A boy who has done juvenile jail-time multiple times before the age of 10. Again, what do these children have to be thankful for? How can our little text messages mean anything in a world like theirs?
The time came for them to begin talking about what they were thankful for and Kyle found himself worrying as to what these kids would say: what do they, in the brokenness that is their lives, have to be thankful for? Why are we even putting them in this situation when it can only turn out to be embarrassing for them and for everyone involved?
And yet, children have the amazing capacity again and again to see light in the darkness; to see that single burning flame in the midst of pitch black. Because when asked what they were thankful for this Thanksgiving, most of them spoke right to my friend saying, “I’m thankful for you.”
“I’m thankful for you.”
Through all the mess of their lives, the utter darkness that encompasses every step they take, the kids flocked to the one light they had been shown, the one beacon of hope in their existence in the form of this guy who spends a very small amount of time with them. Not even someone who is there everyday or someone who is there through the hard times, but somebody who shows up every once in awhile when it’s time to help volunteer. And still the kids claimed thankfulness for my friend. Because they had been shown love in a world in which love is something extremely rare and unfamiliar. Because a small breath of life had found it’s way to them through this caring man.
Last night, I was walking back home from Sugar Brown’s, this wonderfully cozy little coffee shop in Lubbock where I like to read and soak in the sounds and smells of the place. As I began making my way home, I was struck by the brilliance of the West Texas sunset. That’s one of my favorite things about Lubbock, one of those things that you won’t find anywhere else. The land is so flat and expansive that the sky fills up most of the landscape, and when God wants to paint a picture, He’s got more canvas here than almost anywhere else in the world. And this was a painting like I’d never seen before. It wasn’t like one of those brilliantly bright sunsets with the light blues and bright violets and neon orange. Instead, I feel as if God wanted to do something special, something different for the eve of Thanksgiving. So He pulled out a dark orange that makes your soul ache and some lavender and dark purple that makes your insides settle. And to top it off, He used a sort of heavy blue that your heart feels it can rest peacefully within.
And He painted. He painted something so wondrous that I almost stopped in the middle of the street with my mouth open. This wondrous thing God had done on this evening, this symphony of color that God composes every single night, still has the capability to amaze me and reduce me to awestruck worship.
The most curious thing about sunsets to me is where in time that they occur. The day is ending and the hours are waning down and darkness is approaching. But a sunset really isn’t day or night, is it? It’s kind of the in-between, the place where you are not working to finish the day, nor are you settling in to make dinner and get the kids in bed or get some last minute reading done. It’s a place in time where God has commissioned something beautiful to happen before the darkness comes and after the light has done it’s work, in which all of mankind stops and watches, admiring this sacred moment that exists in nature.
I think thankfulness is like a sunset. We don’t really notice the sun during the day unless it’s particularly hot and is making us uncomfortable, very much like the good things in our lives. If our lives are full of only people that love us and only good things that happen, how would we know what to be thankful for? And the same is true of the night and darkness: without the light, you would not know that such a thing as darkness or night even existed because that’s all you know. What is night without daytime as it’s opposite and the sun without the moon as it’s sister? In the same way, how can we know that a good thing is good or a bad thing is bad without the other to compare it to?
It is with experience and recognition of both the horrid, wretched events in our lives alongside the wondrously joyous moments that true, non-contrived thankfulness is born. When the day is over and the night is ready to come, the sunset showers humanity in a bath of triumph and glory that is unlike either the day or the night, either the light or the dark. But rather it’s the brilliant expression and acknowledgment of the entire weight of human experience.
Real, deep thankfulness comes like this. When we look on one side of us and see the light, and on the other side of us and see the darkness, and know that neither can exist without the other. That without the darkness, we would not be able to see that our lives are lit by those who love us. And without the light we would not have anything to be thankful for at all. It is in the sunset that we see where the triumphs in our lives meet the tragedies, and we can find ourselves dropping to our knees in thankfulness for it all.
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