Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!
Another Thanksgiving is upon us—another riot of food and relatives and small children and mashed potatoes and singing and noise and joy and pie. What shall we do with it all?
We cannot hold onto it. Our minds are not big enough. No brain is spacious and tenacious enough. Try to recall every detail of last year’s Thanksgiving and see how far you get. One fleeting detail—perhaps two—and you’re done. We are locked in time and no matter how often we rattle the cage of memory, no one has a key. All our grasping and clutching for one produces only rage and empty wind.
We cannot reproduce it. No matter how many pictures we snap and videos we take and how often we resolve to pull them out and savor every delicious moment…time erodes its way into every one. New memories will crowd them out. Old age will lower the lights. Death will cut us off. Every single thing around you today will one day disintegrate into dirt and dust. As one of our own poets has said, nothing lasts. Nothing tastes.
Nothing but Love.
The capital is intentional, because love (contrary to our modern feelies) is not an emotion alone. It is far more than a sympathetic chemical reaction produced by proximity to a desired object. No, Love is a Person. THE Person, really. The one from whom all Persons, all Existence, are named. And true to His name, He has given us everything He ever thought we needed.
So when God gives me food and relatives and small children and mashed potatoes and singing and noise and joy and pie—all I have to make it last is gratitude. When He gives me students that make teaching pure unalloyed delight, when He puts me on the verge of adopting a child I didn’t create but get to love anyway, when He gives me a thirty-third year that I really shouldn’t have gotten to live—I have to give Him everything I have back. I give him my words and my desires and my job. All my good, wonderful family and happy, wonderful in-laws and gracious, wonderful friends. My church and community and all my endless books. Deep rivers and sky-scraping mountains and minimal deserts and elephant shrews. Even my length of days.
It’s not like I can hold onto them, anyway. But His Hands are big enough to hold them all. They are big enough to shut the mouths of the wicked and preserve the lives of His saints, to tinker with quarks and atoms and novae and galaxies. To hold the keys of Time, and Death, and Hades.
So thank God for all the things He’s piled in front of you, including the mashed potatoes, and hand them back to Him. Don’t worry, they’re safe. After all, only what God touches is eternal.
Nothing but Love.
The capital is intentional, because love (contrary to our modern feelies) is not an emotion alone. It is far more than a sympathetic chemical reaction produced by proximity to a desired object. No, Love is a Person. THE Person, really. The one from whom all Persons, all Existence, are named. And true to His name, He has given us everything He ever thought we needed.
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!
So when God gives me food and relatives and small children and mashed potatoes and singing and noise and joy and pie—all I have to make it last is gratitude. When He gives me students that make teaching pure unalloyed delight, when He puts me on the verge of adopting a child I didn’t create but get to love anyway, when He gives me a thirty-third year that I really shouldn’t have gotten to live—I have to give Him everything I have back. I give him my words and my desires and my job. All my good, wonderful family and happy, wonderful in-laws and gracious, wonderful friends. My church and community and all my endless books. Deep rivers and sky-scraping mountains and minimal deserts and elephant shrews. Even my length of days.
It’s not like I can hold onto them, anyway. But His Hands are big enough to hold them all. They are big enough to shut the mouths of the wicked and preserve the lives of His saints, to tinker with quarks and atoms and novae and galaxies. To hold the keys of Time, and Death, and Hades.
So thank God for all the things He’s piled in front of you, including the mashed potatoes, and hand them back to Him. Don’t worry, they’re safe. After all, only what God touches is eternal.
Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the steadfast love of the LORD.
