The following article was written last year (2007) by me, for the local church paper I write for. It still has a strong message and it is one of my favrote things I have ever written.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
1 Chronicles 29:13
Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise Your glorious name.
Every Thanksgiving we gather around a table with family and friends and pray before our meal for the many blessings God has given us. We sit aside one day to eat a meal with all sorts of family members that come from out of town. As the turkey sits on the table, our mouths water as the mashed potatoes seem to stare at us. It is the one time of the year we can be certain that we give the Creator of taste bud's His due respect and actually give Him the time He deserves before we stuff ourselves.
It does beg a question though doesn't it?
What will you be thanking God for this Thanksgiving?
It's a simple question, that receives simple answers...
Thank you for family.
Thank you for food.
Thank you for health.
So simplistic that I think we overlook the complexity of the event we are about to take place in doing. A seemingly simple but more than complex, evolutionary impossibility, the utterly, not so simplistic act of eating grandma's food.
Mothers Day Weekend, May of 2007, I was sitting at my grandma's cramming down a wonderful piece of steak. Honestly, it was probably one of the most wonderful pieces of steak I have ever eaten. Probably because it was the last steak I would eat all summer. Well let's not be prejudice to steak here. This was the last bit of solid food I would eat all summer.
I started choking on the steak not in a weird "I cannot breathe sort of way" but "The steak is just sitting in my throat and not moving" sort of way. I pondered the situation I was in, and then with what I feared would be my last cough, I coughed it out. Scared, I placed the mangled piece of steak on the plate and thought it profitable to just end the dinner early. Long story short, the next day I had trouble swallowing my food, then the next, and well I just gave up on eating anything of solid substance. Then came series after series of tests that were filled with false fears of strokes, heart aneurysms, complicated surgeries and most importantly, doctor's saying "I have no idea what is wrong with you."
This summer I lost over fifty pounds in a diet I like to call "just stop eating, cause your throat's not working anyway!"
To cram a really long story into a very short article, I just recently started eating again. The Doctor's said their best guess was that the steak caused my throat to become inflamed for a short time, however, since I gave up on eating for a much longer time the muscles became weak due to lack of use.
Of all the things I learned this summer, the most important thing is how little thanks we give God. Doctor after doctor kept telling us not only how complicated the digestive system was, but also how incredibly complicated the ability to swallow food so it could be digested without you choking and dying actually is. Complex nerves trigger muscles and gag reflex's are there to protect you from dying with every single bite of Grandma's moist turkey.
And we just thank God for food, on one day for only three things?
So I challenge you and your family to remember this holiday season to not only thank God for the normal everyday stuff, but take some time to thank him for the things that don't come to mind, like the ability to taste Grandma's stuffing, to swallow grandma's stuffing without dying and for the ability for your body to use that to nourish you and give you energy.
Not to mention the 2,256 times God unknowingly saved you from a deadly car accident because your forgot your key's. The 312 times you slipped and somehow caught yourself, stars stay in the sky, the simple fact the earth continues spinning in gravity, the ocean's stop at the beach and not your house, the earth doesn't fling into the Sun, divine covenants cannot be broken and the sovereign hand of God in um well...everything.
But most importantly as you sit down with friends and family and thank God for those things, make sure the number one thing you praise Him for is His eternally long lasting and undeserving Grace. Ultimately the ability to swallow food is only temporal, however we are promised that one day we will sit, eat and give thanks with Him for eternity.
There, Thanksgiving will not be a one day a year event rudely interrupted the next day by angry Christmas shoppers...it will be forever.
