This is a special, additional post dedicated to
Thanksgiving, which those of us in the Untied States of America celebrate Thursday,
November 22. My regular, promised post, with the same entry date, is directly
below this one. I'll be back on November 26 with the regular post.
_______________________________________
Thanksgiving
is special to me. It should be, since I’m a direct descendant of two of the
Pilgrims who sailed to America in 1620 from England – a little band of mostly
like-minded, pioneers who desired to worship God without fear, persecution or
worldly influences, and who sneaked away from England on a tiny boat to bravely
start life over in another world. (As a side note, do not confuse Pilgrims with
Puritans. The Pilgrims were Separatists: they wanted to separate from the
church to worship their own way. The Puritans, in contrast, wanted to purify – not separate from – the Church
of England.)
When I
think back to that first Thanksgiving – the three-day feast the Pilgrims
celebrated with the Indians – I wonder just how many of them were thinking:
“I’m thankful.” Were they doing it with humble, joyful, or sober hearts?
Certainly,
they were thankful for the Indians, one of whom intervened early to teach them
how to add fish to the soil to improve its growing condition. Massachusetts was
not where they had intended to set up house. Farther down the coast in what is
now the state of Virginia had been the plan. But they arrived too late in the season
and had to settle for the more northern location. They also missed planting
adequately for the upcoming growing season, in Massachusetts’s terra that wasn’t
prime crop-growing soil. Then, most of their tiny band was decimated in the
first six months by disease, starvation and freezing temperatures.
And this is
where it gets personal. My great-great-great, etc., etc., etc. Pilgrim
grandmother, Priscilla Mullins, arrived at Plymouth in Massachusetts with her
brother and their parents, ready to start a new life. Within months, the
teenager’s mother, father, and 14-year-old brother had been buried, along with so
many others, in unmarked graves. By the end of the winter, 102 had died;
fifty-three had survived, including only four adult women out of the original
eighteen. Priscilla was suddenly an orphan in a strange land.
A year
later, during that first Thanksgiving, what could she have been thankful for?
Was she at
all thankful for the thorns in her life?
About
twelve years ago, I started deliberately thanking God for the thorns He’s
brought me, or allowed in my life, because it has been in and through these
thorns that I’ve grown the most emotionally and spiritually.
My thorns
remind me that I’m really a helpless, puny human without much control over my life,
although I often entertain, placate and blind myself by thinking I have more
control than I do. The thorns keep me humble, relying on Something, Someone
greater than myself.
My thorns
still hurt. After all, thorns make you bleed. And they leave nasty scars. Yet they
remind you where you’ve been and what you’ve survived and where you should be
going.
What I will
now write, what I have told others, will shock or disgust some of you and cause
others to nod their heads in collective understanding: As much as I still
grieve over my infant daughter’s death, as much as I still long to have her and
day-dream about her possible life, and mentally replay the dreams I had for
her, I am grateful – thankful – that
I walked that dark, horrible road, because doing so brought me into vivid,
eternal life, with the Supreme give of life. Life in the here and now, and life
in the eternal. *
I’d like to
think that it really didn’t need to happen that way, but in my heart, I know it
did. I would have kept going just as I was, with one foot in the world and the
other on a spiritual banana peel. I’m thankful for those thorns. They remind me
to Whom I belong. And they remind me that I will one day see my daughter
face-to-face and rejoice. They give me one more reason to look forward to
heaven.
So what was
Priscilla thankful for? I can only guess. Even though she was a firm believer
in God, His word, and His promises, I suspect she went through the normal
stages of grief that all of us encounter: shock, denial, anger, etc. Being a
Christian doesn’t make you immune to suffering the affects of death and
profound loss.
She
probably sat at the table, thanking God for His protection over her and the
other survivors, for the memory of her parents and brother, for the hope of the
future, and probably for the new man in her life, John Alden, with whom she
would have ten children and produce more descendants in the United States than
any other Pilgrims. I often think of her and wonder if her unwavering faith and
prayers for her children and children’s children paved the way for the blessings
I’ve received in my life, that my blessings may indeed be the result of her
generational faithfulness. For that, I also give thanks.
What are
your thorns?
And have
you been able to turn them into roses?
May you
give thanks this Thanksgiving Day, for everything in your life!
Until Monday,
Andrea
*If you have questions, and struggle to understand what I’m
talking about, stay with me in this blog, and you’ll find out what I mean.
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