Eggnog season has officially started, so I’ve been making up for the lost time all weekend since I didn’t get to enjoy this sweet nectar last year. 26 family members and friends are about to decend upon my living space. People will laugh and joke with one another as the delicious smells fill the house. Someone will get too stressed over the food preperations (actually, they did that last night already), but they’ll settle down in time to enjoy the company. We’ll rock out to rock band, stuff our faces with a feast of plenty, and a couple uncles will nod off on the couch with a drink still in their hand from too much turkey. Finally, at the end, someone will be up late washing the mile high stack of dishes left in the wake of it all, and we’ll be enjoying left overs for the rest of the week. Thanksgiving day has arrived across Canada. Which may strike any American’s reading this as odd, but you guys have it in the middle of the week on a Thursday inside 6 weeks of Christmas, so really, who you calling odd?
I keep floating back to the last thanksgiving meal I had, in the Philippines, on American Thanksgiving last November. We were excited and blessed to be able to join other missionaries and have a full on Thanksgiving feast – stuffing, pies, gravy, turkey, post-dinner groans and all. Being unsure of what we were actually going to get throughout the year for our traditional celebrations, this put a smile on our faces, and it sure wasn’t hard to think of things to be thankful for. This year, for me, isn’t much different. Missing a year of family celebrations always makes me appreciate them more when I get them again. But more than anything, I find myself being thankful for the additional family God gave me this last year on the race. Sure, I wish they were coming over for some turkey (how we’d fit 53 people in this house would be a worthy challenge for us racers in itself), but really I’m just thankful that they’re in my life.And that was the amazing thing about this year – after being that close to each other all the time, I came away wanting more. Desiring to keep working out the church body God formed us into rather than feeling burned out by it was just one more example of how upside down God’s kingdom is – because who wants more of the hard stuff? But the hard stuff is what completed us. It was real. My friend Scott’s dad says of the bible that you could never put the whole thing (not considering time restraints) just as it is onto the big screen – it’s just too embarassing, weird, and offensive. Incest, murder, adultery, warmongering, cowardice – these are things the heroes of the bible did, and God doesn’t pull a single punch in telling the story of His people. It’s all right there for the world to see in all it’s messiness. And yet, the more you get to know God the more His word just draws you in, exactly as it is. Refusing (or just not having the option) to back away from each other this year whenever things were strained meant seeing people exactly as they were – as messy as I am – and finding common ground there rather than rejection. So today I’m thankful for God’s upside down kingodm that reveals perfection through messiness, but specifically for my world race family, whom He placed in my life to show me a glimpse of a part of that kingdom I hadn’t known before – His body, as it could be.
