Thanksgiving Day
For the last ten years or so, Bill and I have spent Thanksgiving with our two older daughters, their now husbands, and our grandchildren (as they came along). For the last few years, we have made the trip around the bottom of Lake Michigan and then up through Chicago and then farther north and westward to Green Bay, Wisconsin where our daughter, Abigail, teaches history at St. Norbert College and her husband, Dan, works as an architect for the state of Wisconsin. Most years, our daughter, Rebekah, and her husband, Ahmed, and their children have joined us as they were able (years with a newborn were out of the question, not surprisingly). Two years ago, we were all delighted when our daughter, Anna, was able to join us too!
Bill and I have treasured these times with our children and grandchildren, as families do. Holidays have this wonderful power to shake us from our usual work, schedule, demands, and all the rest and deliver us into something else. For us, Thanksgiving has pulled us out of our study and taken us to a house full of loud children’s voices, lots of laughter, and plenty of hugs and kisses! As you might imagine, for a blended family such time together is so precious! With Thanksgivings together year after year (along with a week in the summer when all of our children and grandchildren are with us) we have become a real family.
So, we felt (and still feel) great sadness that we will not be making that blessed trip this week. And this is all made more acute by the fact that we had to cancel our annual gathering in the summer. Of course, our story and our sadness is shared by so many! And it is only harder for people who live alone and, thus, will likely spend Thanksgiving alone. My heart goes out to such folks.
Amidst all this sadness and loss that COVID has brought us, our reading from Luke’s Gospel puts one simple yet powerful question to us. Are we going to be among those who Jesus healed who just kept on walking away from him? Or are we going to be like that one faithful foreigner—a Samaritan, no less—who by his faith returned to Jesus to give thanks. And he does so with such emotion.
As I reflect on my own story, I recall that I was once a leper. Not in the technical sense—but there are real similarities! For a bunch of reasons I won’t detail here (this reflection is already long enough), I was shunned (and Bill was too) by the community that I lived and worked and worshipped in for 12 years because of the way that Bill and I came together. We were, in the mind of that community, so awful that they could have nothing to do with us. There were a few exceptions—but they were few. And, of course, this all was very, very hard on our children. They arguably suffered the most. Back in those days the idea that one day Bill and I would enjoy such blessed times with our children and grandchildren was simply unthinkable. It just couldn’t happen.
And then it did.
So, this Thanksgiving, as I feel the sadness and the loss of our special time in Green Bay, I am going to make sure I return to Jesus, get down on my knees, and thank him for the healing he has done in my life—healing that was in that very dark time of my life utterly impossible.
Today, I invite you to think about the healing Jesus has done in your life. May we all get down on our knees today and thank him.
Amen.
- Sue Trollinger