Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.
Even in tumultuous times, we have much to be thankful for.
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On Thanksgiving
Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.
Even in tumultuous times, we have much to be thankful for.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
How Not to Have a Civil War, Part 12: Gratitude
Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Acknowledging the Divide | Part 3: “Great Is Diana!” | Part 4: Letting Hate Drive | Part 5: Pants on Fire | Part 6: Turning Toward the Light | Part 7: Breaking Down the Walls | Part 8: Beyond Tolerance | Part 9: Love | Part 10: Peace | Part 11: Encouragement
Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father (Col 3.17).
It’s no accident that we come to the end of this relatively lengthy series two days after the US presidential election. Now, regardless of the election’s eventual outcome, it falls to us to decide how to respond to its results—to decide whether we’re going to live in peace with our so-recent political opponents, whether we’re the “winners” or the “losers.”
Paul concludes the passage we’ve been studying with a call to thankfulness, or gratitude. Everything we do, he says, should be done for Christ and in gratitude through him to the Father.
I’ve written on this idea before. And so has Paul. Have you noticed that three of his four admonitions in this paragraph include thanksgiving?
- We live out peace in connection with thankfulness (Col 3.15).
- We encourage one another with thankfulness (Col 3.16).
- We do all things with thankfulness (Col 3.17).
This is a pervasive concept in biblical thinking. God has been unimaginably good to us—so good, in fact, that literally everything evil about the world pales in comparison.
What do you have to be thankful for?
No matter who is president of the US, or which party controls the Senate or the House of Representatives or the Governor’s Mansion or the County Council or the Mayor’s Office,
- You’re living far better, in measurable ways, than 90% of the people in the history of the world.
- There’s plenty of air to breathe—even if you have difficulty breathing.
- Purified, drinkable water still falls from the sky—even if it falls at inopportune times.
- Food still grows right out of the dirt.
- The sun gives us light and warmth every day, without fail.
- There is beauty to be seen and heard and appreciated all around us—in birds, in flowers, in rocks, in waterfalls. Even in morning glories, the bane of my childhood weed-pulling experience.
- God is alive, and great, and good, and engaged in our world, and directing all things to a certain conclusion that is, he assures us, good (Ro 8.28).
- If you’re a believer, you are regenerate (doubly alive), and forgiven, and befriended, and cared for, and loved, and escorted to that good end.
- And you are endowed with a mission, a purpose to live, one that you are well equipped to carry out, one that will certainly succeed, and one that will eventuate in perfect relationships and perfect glory.
There’s not a government or official in all the history of all the universe who can negate or even endanger any of that, or who can compete with that for any of my confidence or my fear.
God is great. God is good.
Let us thank him.
And let us live out that gratitude with a confidence and joy and grace that makes even our “enemies”—who are, when all is said and done, our fellow images of God and the ordered objects of our grace—to be at peace with us (Pr 16.7).
Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash
On My Father’s 100th Birthday
Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. He lived only (?!) to the age of 90, but he had a really interesting life—railroad conductor, printer, pilot, kinda travel agent, small business owner. He was never boring. Scary maybe, but never boring.
The thing that I find really remarkable about his life is the amount of change he saw.
He was born on the frontier. His father, after the murder of his own father, headed west from Missouri looking for opportunity. Eventually he homesteaded—that Homestead Act was a real boon to upward mobility—just below the Continental Divide outside Salmon, Idaho, on land that no one had ever tamed before, and he and his wife and 11 children worked like oxen to make a living for themselves.
And here’s the thing. They lived, in 1918, pretty much the same way people lived in Abraham’s day. They built their own houses by hand, carried water in from the creek, fended off the darkness with oil lamps, powered their farming with animals, and did their excretory business in a hole in the ground. Oh, eventually they got electricity, and my grandfather even bought a car before it was all over, but when Dad was born, the routine of daily life hadn’t changed much for 4000 years.
Dad’s mother died when he was 7, and his father when he was 13, and from then on he was raised relatively haphazardly by a series of older siblings as they were able. Graduated from high school a year or two late, eventually served his country in World War II—as part of the greatest generation—and came home to work with his hands to scrape together a thousand bucks or two every year to feed the wife and three kids. Leave it to Beaver, indeed.
Not well educated, but a constant reader, he created a fully organic subsistence farm, before hardly anybody was even talking about such things, on a mere two acres of land in (really) Greenacres, Washington, then piled the whole family into a Rambler station wagon and a ’54 Nash to move clear across the country for a white-collar job. (No, my name’s not Joad.)
After they finally got the kids out of the house, he and Mom retired to southern New Mexico, where within a few short years Mom died and he was left pretty much alone with his tool-sharpening shop. After he’d spent 25 years there, an ER doctor called me from New Mexico and said, “You need to come get your Dad.”
And for the last 6 years of his life, as his well-used but well-worn mind slowly ebbed, I cared for him as he needed it, but left him his independence as much as I thought was safe.
And one evening the two of us sat together at my computer, fired up Google Earth, and went back to Salmon. He guided me up the Salmon River to Baker, where he went to school (yep, on horseback, in the snow) and then north up Sandy Creek to the old homestead. It was right here, on the west side, he said. And I dropped the perspective as low as I could, and we stood on the old land and looked up Sandy Creek to the Divide, where he’d hiked over into Montana one time when he was a teen and got upset with somebody.
In one lifetime, he went from the days of Abraham to Web-based virtual reality on a laptop. In one lifetime, his life changed in pretty much all the ways that the world has changed since it began.
What a time to be alive.
Dad didn’t make it to 100—here, anyway—and I’m confident that he wouldn’t have wanted to. But what a life he had, and what lives he has left behind. Sons and daughters who have all known success, all in remarkably different ways. Two grandsons who are Service Academy graduates, and two granddaughters with great abilities and extensive experiences around the world.
And life, for him, goes on, in a way that I don’t have the experience to describe.
Hallelujah.
Photo by Ember + Ivory on Unsplash
Three Days with Hilaire: On Caring to Make a Difference
When I was a boy, my Dad worked for a politically conservative speaker’s bureau. As a result, I got to meet a lot of interesting people when they came to town to give a speech. There was Gen. Robert Scott, WW2 fighter pilot and author of the book God Is My Co-Pilot, who sat at our dinner table and told wonderful story after wonderful story. There was Maj. Pedro Diaz Lanz, compatriot of Fidel Castro and chief of the Cuban Air Force, who defected and told horrific stories of repression in Cuba. There was Slobodan Draskovich, who hijacked a commercial flight to get out of Communist Yugoslavia, and who thought the wire leading to the electric blanket in our guest bedroom was evidence that someone was trying to kill him.
But my favorite was Hilaire du Berrier, a farm boy from North Dakota who was expelled by Pillsbury Military Academy (later the campus of Pillsbury Baptist Bible College) a month before graduation and eventually ran off to be a soldier of fortune. He fought against the Fascists in Ethiopia and spied against the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, then spied against the Japanese in Shanghai during their occupation of China. (As part of his cover he rented a room to a woman who later became one of Mao’s wives and was eventually disgraced as leader of the Gang of Four.) Eventually captured by the Japanese, he bore the scars of torture during their interrogation.
In short, he had a lot of stories to tell.
In town for a speaking engagement, he stayed at our house for 3 days in the spring of ’63.
I was a hyperactive kid, a complete pain in the neck.
He took an interest in me.
He showed me how to make a different kind of paper airplane. He told me stories about his idol, Napoleon. (Hilaire’s real name was Harold; he changed it to Hilaire in honor of one of Napoleon’s generals.) He took me to an office-supply store and showed me where they sold liquid rubber, the kind you use to make tear-off pads of paper. It was pink and had a distinctly pungent smell. He showed me that you could take a 3-dimensional object—he had a metal eagle that he’d gotten off a Napoleonic dispatch case, and why he had it with him on that trip, I’ll never know—and cover it with several layers of liquid rubber to make a mold. Then he showed me how to mix plaster of paris (is that French?), pour it into the mold, insert a wire in the back, and make an exact copy of the object, paint it (with gold paint!), and yield a pretty cool wall plaque. He took a little plaque I already had, with the Cub Scout oath on it, and we made a copy of that too.
I was a lot older when I realized that he had been teaching me spycraft.
He had a lady friend in our town—she was the host of the local Romper Room show—and incited me to come along on a dinner date to act as escort for her daughter. He instructed and rehearsed me to present my “date”—I was 8—with one of our cool gold-painted plaster eagles and induct her into the Society of Napoleon. We had a fabulous time at a fancy restaurant in Spokane. (In those days, there weren’t a lot of those.)
Hilaire was an artist as well; he’d done commercial art in Chicago before running off to chase adventure. He told me I should write a book; he laid out a characterization for me, presenting each of my family members as an interesting animal: Mel Mouse, Pauline Pony, Betty Jeanne Jackrabbit (though he misspelled her name), Kathy Cat, and, of course, Danny Dog. I should write The Story of Danny Dog and His Friends, he told me, and he said he would wait expectantly for me to send him a copy when it was published.
A few days later, having returned from the speaking tour to his apartment in New York, he wrote me a letter to let me know he was still thinking about me, and to encourage me to get to work on The Book.
He lived another 40 years, writing an international intelligence subscription letter called HduB Reports, eventually dying in his 90s, a tax exile in Monaco.
I’ve never forgotten the time he took during those 3 days to reach out to a painfully energetic boy, giving his attention to a kid who needed direction, planting ideas in me that I have gone back to as an adult and that I remember well now more than 50 years later.
Thank you, Hilaire. I’m grateful.
Grace
I’ve been thinking recently, as I often do, about the many ways God has been kind to me. His greatest kindness, of course, has been in drawing me to himself. It’s a story worth telling.
Early on, my parents were not religious people, at least not so’s you’d notice. Dad was a Westerner, orphaned at 13 and shepherded through his teen years relatively haphazardly by his older siblings. Mom’s family was devoutly Universalist—my uncle, Carleton Fisher, was the last president of the Universalist Church and thus one of the founders of the UU’s, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, back around 1960. As we kids were showing up, the family bounced around southeastern Washington State, living in towns with names like College Place and Colfax and Diamond and Elberton and Trentwood and Greenacres, as Dad followed work available in his two professions, the railroad and printing.
As the kids got a little older, my parents thought it wise for us to go to some kind of church, so we attended a church in Opportunity, of which I have dim memories, but we did not hear the gospel there.
They became interested in politics—like most Westerners of that day, the conservative kind—and there they met a few people who spoke, oddly, of something called being born again, and they began to realize that not all churches were like that. I remember playing on the kitchen floor as they were sitting at the table discussing whether their minister knew about this “saved” thing.
They found a church that was what we today would call evangelical, and one Sunday we all showed up. Fourth Memorial Church in Spokane was officially Presbyterian, but they had just voted to leave their denomination over liberalism, so they were ecclesiastically independent—and I was much older before I realized that an independent Presbyterian church is an oxymoron.
I was 6 and was shuffled off to the age-appropriate Sunday school class.
And none of the other kids showed up that day.
The teacher—I remember her as an impossibly old lady, maybe as old as 60!—set aside her planned lesson and joined me at the table in one of those little kiddie chairs. We just sat and talked. As the conversation progressed, she realized that I knew nothing of the gospel, and so, simply and kindly, she told me The Good News.
I didn’t know much of anything; I knew nothing about the Bible or theology or supralapsarianism.
But I believed. I believed simply and awkwardly, but I believed in the same God as Peter and Paul, the covenant-keeping God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And so, due to the mission focus and caring shepherding of a little “old” lady, I became a child of God, with spiritual life.
I don’t even know her name. I look forward to thanking her in person one day.
There was a lot of growing ahead. I faced a long period of behavioral problems—I suppose I was ADHD, although they weren’t diagnosing it in those days. Shortly later, in the same church, I was removed from another Sunday school class because the teacher couldn’t control me—I like to say that I was the only person I’ve ever heard of who was expelled from Sunday school—and in first grade, at that! I drove my older sisters to tears and frustration with my pestering ways. And once, at 16, I walked away from the faith for a year—or tried to, anyway.
But through those years, a long line of faithful servants of God poured grace and truth into my life, in a series of churches, large and small, on both coasts, and in a Christian school in New England. They endured my shenanigans—I wasn’t malicious, just, well, exuberant—and patiently discipled me, tiny step by tiny step along a rocky path, made so by my own selfishness and general lack of self-control.
That time I walked away from the faith? It was just after graduating from the Christian high school, just after receiving all that care from all those selfless people. Sheeeeeeesh.
I can never repay them. Nor can I ever repay the God who gave them life before he gave it to me, who arranged for them to be alongside my life’s road, and who used them as instruments of his grace.
Who is worthy of such things? How can it be anything but grace?
I am grateful. And content. And satisfied.
The world is broken, and all its people are broken, but God, God, is infinitely good.
Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash
On Thanksgiving
Since it’s Thanksgiving Day in the US, I thought I’d repeat a thankful post from this past July 27.
_______________
Early in our marriage, when we were in the process of making friends with other young couples, my wife and I would occasionally notice that as we socialized in our home or in someone else’s, some people always seemed to be upset about something. They’d tell us the story of how they were wronged in some way, how some injustice was done. The next time we were together, they had their tails in a knot about something else. Always upset, always holding on to wrongs, real or imagined.
Once, we made the conscious decision to minimize our socializing with one such couple. These days the internet memes say, “You just don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.” And it’s true.
It puzzles me how some people can be so ungrateful. People don’t treat them right; they don’t get paid enough; their mother-in-law is a pain in the neck; their boss is an idiot. And on it goes.
A colleague of mine remarked to me several years ago, “You know, life’s going to happen, no matter what you do. Some of it will be unpleasant. You can be bitter about it, or you can be happy in spite of it. The choice is up to you. I decided,” she said, “to be happy.” And boy, was she.
As result of her example, I began to think about all the ways I’ve been blessed. And one day it occurred to me that everything I need—literally everything—is free. That’s the way God has arranged the universe.
Don’t believe me? Think about it.
What do you need more than anything else in the world? If you lack it for 30 seconds, it will be literally all you think about until you get some.
Yep, oxygen.
Free.
You’re swimming at the bottom of an ocean of it—an ocean that God has kindly diluted so you won’t burst into flame at the slightest spark. God’s even given you a scoop on the front of your head so you’ll get your share of the stuff. Some of you he gave a larger scoop to, and you have the gall to be upset with him about that. Shame on you.
What’s the second most necessary thing? Water. They say you can last 3 days without it—some maybe as much as 8 to 10 days under certain conditions. But not long.
Most of the globe is covered with it. And that water mass feeds a delivery system that brings it right to your feet, purified, for free. (Unless you live in the Atacama, which hardly anybody does.) And again, many of us complain when it rains. Especially at the beach.
Granted, I pay a water bill, but I’m not really paying for the water; I’m paying for someone to clean it up and bring it to my house. I choose to do that, but I have a big ol’ plastic barrel that I could use to get my water for free.
What’s next? Food. Grows right out of the ground, from plants that are already there. Free. Again, I pay for my food, but only because I don’t feel like growing my own. So I pay somebody else to grow and harvest and deliver it; and sometimes I go out to a restaurant and pay somebody else to cook it and bring it to my table. But the food? The food’s free.
And then there’s light, and heat, and all the other physical necessities. All free.
God has been remarkably good to us.
But you’re thinking (I hope), those aren’t our greatest needs. They’re just temporal. We have greater needs: forgiveness, relationship, grace, mercy, peace. Love.
What do you know? They’re all free, too.
Everything you need is free.
I don’t mean to minimize anyone’s suffering. The world is broken, and we and everyone we know here are broken as well, by sin. Suffering is real. Abuse is real. Pain is real. Death is real.
But we have much to be grateful for, and these jewels shine all the brighter against the black background of pain.
Today’s homework: read Psalm 145.
“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously [freely!] give us all things?” (Rom 8.32).
Photo by Willem Karssenberg on Unsplash
Grateful for Grace
Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash
Early in our marriage, when we were in the process of making friends with other young couples, my wife and I would occasionally notice that as we socialized in our home or in someone else’s, some people always seemed to be upset about something. They’d tell us the story of how they were wronged in some way, how some injustice was done. The next time we were together, they had their tails in a knot about something else. Always upset, always holding on to wrongs, real or imagined.
Once, we made the conscious decision to minimize our socializing with one such couple. These days the internet memes say, “You just don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.” And it’s true.
It puzzles me how some people can be so ungrateful. People don’t treat them right; they don’t get paid enough; their mother-in-law is a pain in the neck; their boss is an idiot. And on it goes.
A colleague of mine remarked to me several years ago, “You know, life’s going to happen, no matter what you do. Some of it will be unpleasant. You can be bitter about it, or you can be happy in spite of it. The choice is up to you. I decided,” she said, “to be happy.” And boy, was she.
As result of her example, I began to think about all the ways I’ve been blessed. And one day it occurred to me that everything I need—literally everything—is free. That’s the way God has arranged the universe.
Don’t believe me? Think about it.
What do you need more than anything else in the world? If you lack it for 30 seconds, it will be literally all you think about until you get some.
Yep, oxygen.
Free.
You’re swimming at the bottom of an ocean of it—an ocean that God has kindly diluted so you won’t burst into flame at the slightest spark. God’s even given you a scoop on the front of your head so you’ll get your share of the stuff. Some of you he gave a larger scoop to, and you have the gall to be upset with him about that. Shame on you.
What’s the second most necessary thing? Water. They say you can last 3 days without it—some maybe as much as 8 to 10 days under certain conditions. But not long.
Most of the globe is covered with it. And that water mass feeds a delivery system that brings it right to your feet, purified, for free. (Unless you live in the Atacama, which hardly anybody does.) And again, many of us complain when it rains. Especially at the beach.
Granted, I pay a water bill, but I’m not really paying for the water; I’m paying for someone to clean it up and bring it to my house. I choose to do that, but I have a big ol’ plastic barrel that I could use to get my water for free.
What’s next? Food. Grows right out of the ground, from plants that are already there. Free. Again, I pay for my food, but only because I don’t feel like growing my own. So I pay somebody else to grow and harvest and deliver it; and sometimes I go out to a restaurant and pay somebody else to cook it and bring it to my table. But the food? The food’s free.
And then there’s light, and heat, and all the other physical necessities. All free.
God has been remarkably good to us.
But you’re thinking (I hope), those aren’t our greatest needs. They’re just temporal. We have greater needs: forgiveness, relationship, grace, mercy, peace. Love.
What do you know? They’re all free, too.
Everything you need is free.
I don’t mean to minimize anyone’s suffering. The world is broken, and we and everyone we know here are broken as well, by sin. Suffering is real. Abuse is real. Pain is real. Death is real.
But we have much to be grateful for, and these jewels shine all the brighter against the black background of pain.
Today’s homework: read Psalm 145.
“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously [freely!] give us all things?” (Rom 8.32).