What are you not thankful for? Was it the green bean casserole at
your thanksgiving table? The uncle who couldn’t stop goading you on about
Donald Trump? The evangelical cousin who did quite believe in your secular
grace and said another just in case? I have found it very helpful to save
some room for what we are not thankful for after thanksgiving; a sort of
spiritual purging of the soul. If only we would have said no thanks to the
second helping of pie. It is possible to go too far: You all have heard of
the man who climbed up to the roof to out wait a storm, he prayed to God to deliver
him. Just then a boat came by “jump in” said the owner, “No thanks, I am
waiting to be saved by God”. The boat man shrugged and off he went. The water
level started coming up the roof, just then a second boat came along and
again the same answer. Finally, a
rescue helicopter flew overhead and they shouted out “grab hold of the ladder”.
“No thanks” came the reply, “I am waiting for God to save me”. The floor
overtook him and he drowned. Upon reaching heaven he asked God “Why didn’t
you save me?” to which the Almighty replied “I tried. Apparently two boats
and a helicopter weren’t good enough for you.”
So post-thanksgiving we know what we are thankful for but how about
what we are not thankful for. I am thankful for the rich bookish world and
academic grounding of my heritage, but not so thankful for its cool emotional
distance. Others are thankful for wealth, others for love.
But my point here is that your name, like your past represents a
part of you and in some way we can all be thankful for what it has given us. I
often say that no experience goes unlearned. There are those around us who
have suffered enormously. I know of one woman who had been abused by her
family, married twice and divorced by the time she was 19. She had had 4
different last names. When I met her she had chosen her own name from a novel
and went to the courthouse to make it hers. Despite her hard past she still
gave thanks though for the lessons she learned. She is a tremendous human
being, kind, caring, a good judge of character and had the life experience to
relate to almost anyone. It was as if in choosing her own name and leaving
all those other names behind her she had moved on to what her life had taught
her and what she was truly thankful for.
Thanks for the lessons of life, she said, but no thanks for those
markers to the past that were so painful.
With Grace and Grit, John
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