Thanksgiving dinners have always been a big deal for me. I
grew up around my great grandmother’s table with all my dad’s relatives. Since our house was a castle with the draw
bridge up, it was the biggest gathering outside of school that I experienced,
and I LOVED it!
This year I am greeting the holiday with some of my typical
anxiety. Living in a foreign country there isn’t the same build up, and there
aren’t relatives, which means the organization falls on me and that is a hard
fall.
I wanted a room filled with people, all my tables and chairs
getting used, but not this year. I currently find myself without a large group
of friends. Thankfully I do have people coming who are wonderful.
Last week I was at a leadership-training seminar surrounded
by people. I met new folks and old
friends and we laughed and we cried and I immensely enjoyed being around ALL of
them.
We celebrated Communion together; the Lord’s Table. The kids used to call it the Lord’s
lunch. Each table was green felt with a
bowl of broken matzo crackers and a glass of grape juice, not very visually
appealing. I thought of a lovely
Thanksgiving table, covered with expensive, delicious food, flowers and candles.
What sharp contrast visually but spiritually, the Lord’s Table was much more.
The price of the two items in that supper was incomprehensible, the meaning so
much deeper.
We sang a song. One of the lines was about me, “Once your
enemy, now seated at your table.”
The past two years we have had a guest at our thanksgiving
table that probably won’t be there this year. We invited them and still
hope. Christ did everything so I, the
enemy, could sit at his table. I didn’t
want to come, but he invited me anyway and paid for everything I needed so I
could come.
This year as I prepare my thanksgiving dinner I will miss
some friends to the point of weeping.
And yet I want to remember the price it cost God, the price of His only
Son’s death, for me to sit at His table and that is truly something for which
to be grateful.
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