A trying Thanksgiving Day

The November sunlight lay in golden patches along the quiet neighborhood street where Dayle sat on the front stoop watching handful of leaves dance to the rhythm of an early morning breeze. The family had gathered at her sister’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving, but Dayle was not sure that she had a grateful bone in her body.

The year had been a bad one that was filled with loss and pain. In fact, Dayle had dubbed it the “year of tears.” From January until Thanksgiving Day, she could not recall a single day that tears had not rushed to her eyes. It made her wonder if she might spend the rest of her life struggling with her grief and nursing the ache in her heart.

It was unusual for her to be so wrapped up in sorrow because she had lived through troubling times before and was able to come through with a song in her heart. Even now there had been brief periods of enjoyment, but they seemed to be vanishing as quickly as they came.

As Dayle wrestled with her thoughts that autumn morning she suddenly remembered one day when her daughter came to her and carefully handed her four small pieces of hardened clay.

“Mom, my world has fallen apart,” she said.

Dayle did not understand at first, but on closer inspection she could see that her daughter had fashioned a world out of the blue and green mixture of clay that now lay broken in her hands.

Acting like the typical fix-it-all mother, she gently led Anna into her office and with a few pieces of tape put her clay world back together again.

“But Mom, it still has holes and cracks all in it,” Anna said, and most certainly it did.

For years Dayle kept that cracked ball of clay in her desk drawer, unable to forget her child’s disappointment when her world fell apart. How appropriate it was that she thought about it on Thanksgiving Day.

Later in the afternoon, the family gathered around a splendid Thanksgiving table and joined hands with the ones next to them. With a voice soft and low, her father said, “Children we have so much to be thankful for today.” That simple sentence had a very large impact on Dayle. As she looked around the table at each member of her family all that had burdens of their own, yet there they sat all smiling at each other and nodding in agreement.

It was then that Dayle realized that at some point during her years of tears that she had lost touch with something vital to her. Deep inside her heart she had been crying for the one who could bind up the fractured pieces of her world and could fill the cracks with lasting peace. And God had been there all the time, but she had been so consumed with her personal sorrow that she had lost focus.

Then suddenly from somewhere deep down, a feeling of thanksgiving rose up in Dayle, and she knew at that moment that everything would be okay. As the family bowed their heads, the prayer found in the Bible’s third chapter of Habakkuk became her own prayer that day: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Lord God is my strength.”

No matter what our losses may be this Thanksgiving season we need to find the courage to look around ourselves and give thanks to God for all the good things that he continues to bless us with.

May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day with your family and friends!