In my memory, my childhood Thanksgivings are virtually indistinct from one another. Each year featured my mother, wrist-deep in the still-too-frozen turkey, calling my father to come help her free the giblets from the bird's chest cavity. The kitchen was always bursting with people: one of the grandmas who had come to visit, whichever of us four kids Mom could recruit to chop apples or peel potatoes, perhaps a stray student or two from the university where my parents taught. The Thanksgiving dinner would sooner or later make it to the table: crescent rolls from a can, my great-grandmother's cranberry salad, stuffing, corn, mashed potatoes, a sweet potato casserole that most of us wouldn't eat, maybe some green beans, and an apple crisp for dessert since most of us didn't eat pumpkin pie. The six Mayeses and our guests would crowd around the kitchen table, give thanks, and eat before falling into the happy stupor of the full.
Thanksgiving of 2009 would have gone much the same had there not been one small problem: there was a table saw where our kitchen table should have been. Our living room had been gutted for renovations, and there was no possibility we could host. And so, for the only time in my memory, we were guests that Thanksgiving.
A longtime friend of our family's (my father's officemate at the time) took pity on us and invited us over for dinner. Their grown children and grandchildren could not join them that year, but between us and the few college students who had been invited as well, the table was full nevertheless. His wife did the cooking; our only contribution, as I recall, was a dessert.
What ensued was one of the happiest Thanksgivings I can remember. Though I have long since forgotten many of the specifics of what all was served and discussed at that table, I recollect with perfect clarity the feeling I had as we left: that this unconventional Thanksgiving was beautiful precisely because it was unconventional. It was nothing like our traditional celebration, but in some ways I felt it was truer to the spirit of the holiday. We had come together with family and friends to remember how much we had been given and to give thanks, and the fact that God had met our needs even in the midst of unusual circumstances made us especially grateful.
I've been thinking a lot about that Thanksgiving this year. Thanksgiving of 2020 is far different from Thanksgivings of years past. It does not look or feel the same; for many of us, it seems there is little to give thanks for. I know many families have seen difficult changes and challenges this year especially––mine certainly has.
Today, we gathered for the first time in my parents' new home in Minnesota, a house where I have no memories, a place which, a year ago at this time, was merely a twinkle in the eye of Providence. No grandparents joined us; my older brother and his wife could not make it; my youngest brother, stationed in Arizona, was absent as well. Some family gatherings, I know, have been even more abbreviated, or canceled altogether this year. For all of us, this is undoubtedly a strange Thanksgiving.
Stranger still is the command to live up to the name of this holiday and actually give thanks, not only today with our stomachs full of carbs, but in all things. Gratitude is natural when circumstances are favorable, but rarely do I feel thankful for difficulties. Such gratitude––the gratitude that blesses God when He takes and not only when He gives––is supernatural. It requires us to adopt God's eternal definition of goodness in place of our temporal one.
In God's economy, anything that shapes us into His image can be good. Like a gutted house, we must sometimes be laid bare before we can be built up. The process is prolonged and painful at times (and it may replace a kitchen table with a table saw for a time), but in the end, it transforms us into a fitting dwelling place for our God. In this process, both pain and prosperity work for the betterment of our souls and the advancement of God's kingdom. Knowing this truth, we can be content in either extreme.
To give thanks in everything is not a lesson to be learned on a single holiday, but a discipline to be practiced over a lifetime. Thanksgiving is both a habit of mind and a gift of grace. It is strange to give thanks, and it is so very, very good.