What Are You Thankful For?
With the fast approach of the celebration of Thanksgiving comes the expected question: what are you thankful for?
Each year my answer varies, but adds up to “my family and the fact that I’m still here!” Why so short you ask? Because really, I’m all about keeping it as monosyllabic as possible in order to do my part to keep the clock down and the food warm; cause invariably, there will always be someone who starts back at the year they were born and brings it forward.
This year, prompted by a thread in one of my groups, I’m putting it out there early and taking the time to elaborate a bit.
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I co-teach the Sr. High level at my church. Today’s Sunday School lesson was about the scenario when God whispers to Elijah… the last existing prophet at that time. He was having a serious pity party because Queen Jezebel had just promised his imminent death in retaliation for his killing her hundreds of Priests of Baal. Elijah ran away. He left his servant in Beersheba in Judah then a day later of walking landed him in the desert under a large bush for shade. There he begged the Lord, “I’ve had enough. Just let me die! I’m no better off than my ancestors.” Then he lay down in the shade and fell asleep. While he was asleep an angel woke him up and provided water and some baked bread. He ate and went back to sleep.
I was easily able to tap into his emotions, for I’d been where he was at age fourteen. Fed up with being different, fed up with colloquialisms I didn’t understand, fed up with being home alone, fed up that I couldn’t have friends over or use the phone while alone, fed up of being afraid of the dark, fed up of hating school, fed up of feeling out of sorts, fed up of the guilt for possessing/experiencing an emotion for which I didn’t yet have a name (depression).
I was already in my desert, (no friends to speak of and alone in an Apt in the USofA while the rest of my family resided in Trinidad) I didn’t make a declaration out loud but I was ready to lay down in the shade (my bed) and die (with the assistance of a bottle of bills).
I recall sitting on the floor, my back against the side of the bed with the bottle of pills in my hands… tears running down my face as I resolved to enact my “deliverance” Oh but wait… maybe a bit of TV first. I was a TV-a-holic at the time.
I turned on the TV and the channel must have been lifetime…
Fortuitous that the movie just beginning opened into the scene of a funeral?
Even more uncanny that the deceased was a teenager who’d committed suicide?
The movie then went on to chronicle the reactions of the parents. The blame, the shame, the anger, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the selfishness.
As I sat there and cried, I wasn’t aware of it then, but I am now… as God whispered to Elijah… that TV was my whisper, God showing me His presence … in my aloneness and moment of self-pity.
So when I say that I’m thankful that I’m still here… I mean it… literally.
I’m also grateful that I work with teenagers at my church and because of my experiences as a teenager… I’m sensitive to the small things and available “on their level” (their words) to listen, council, encourage, hang, hug and/or cry.
Sooo… since we’ve got time and no food is getting cold… yet. What are you thankful for?