My Thanksgiving

Thankful am I that we have a God who is loving, merciful, generous beyond measure, and forgiving.  And, most thankful am I that we have a God who likes to express that love through humanity, in community, in congregation.

After our daughter was born, the townhouse we had bought in 2007 suddenly became a huge burden.  My wife and I recognized that with both of us working and thus needing daycare, we would be losing several hundreds of dollars each month.  Our home value had dropped almost in half, so we couldn’t rent it, and our choice for my wife to not resume full-time work made everything more urgent.  She spent months applying for loan modifications, getting denied each and every time.  Meanwhile, I was battling some really difficult strongholds.  I felt that God had truly blessed us with this, our “first home”, and that I had somehow fallen short, that I had not been a good steward of this gift.  I was determined to hold on, no matter what.  It was God’s blessing right, how could we let it go?

More slowly than I’d like to admit, I uncovered that my “good stewardship” was really just “deep stubbornness,” and that my biggest fear, even over disappointing God, was looking bad to those around me.  What kind of man was I, that I would let our home slip through our fingers right after the birth of our first child?  

Thankful am I that God started to whisper in that darkness.  I started praying with friends, really opening up to several, opening up my Bible.  I remembered that my real treasures are not made of plaster and stairs and brick and carpet, but in relationship, in heart, in trust.  And, almost immediately after surrendering the fears and self-scorn, we decided we needed to surrender the house, and we felt a groundswelling of hope and relief.  I was blind, but then I saw.

Friends of friends at our church, some we'd never had so much as a conversation together, helped us find a place, helped us to move.  Dwellers bent over backwards to help us pack and pick up the piano, to bind up the materials of our life.  When all our “stuff” was hidden within brown cardboard cubes, I looked up and saw this motley crew of a moving team laughing, singing, talking about work, asking me where this should go.  God’s love showered upon me through friends wielding Sharpie pens, tape rolls, and an occasional break to dance the Macarena.

My greatest fear was judgment, was looking bad to my peers and community.  What we got, instead, was only love.  And this: when you turn your heart on to being thankful, truly thankful, it can spread like a wildfire within, burning out those dead trees, clearing a path for something new, generating new heat and new light.  The world tells me that in 2011, we lost.  Okay, maybe.   But, miraculously, I feel thanksgiving.  Thankful was I for the young married couple that hung in through the long short-sale process, meaning we didn’t have to foreclose in the end.  Thankful was I to be vacuuming that empty house to get it ready for them, which would become their first-ever home.  Thankful was I that we lived there for 4 years with great memories.  The time to live there was over, but we had most definitely not lost.  We entered as 2, now there are 3 of us.  That’s addition, not subtraction.  And when I think of all the folks that came together to help, I realize it’s multiplication.

Thankful am I that we have a God who is loving, merciful, generous beyond measure, and forgiving.  And, most thankful am I that we have a God who likes to express that love through the willing hearts and hands of people broken people like you, like me, like all of us.


Peace through the love of Jesus,
Matthew