A Pilgrim Thanksgiving

I've really been looking forward to celebrating this Thanksgiving. It's been a good year, and there are many things for our family to be thankful for. A new marriage that all parties are adjusting to nicely, good performances by both Katie and Jonathan in school, a beautiful new home, a new church family that has embraced Katie, Jonathan, and me--more than I could ever write here. And we'll be hosting Thanksgiving dinner for family in our new home, using our new dining room furniture. Could things be better?

But it's a strange juxtaposition of events for some families in our congregation this week. We received word on Sunday morning that one couple's 48-year-old son, a godly Christian husband and father, died after a ten-year battle with cancer. And this afternoon, a dear friend who has been an elder in our church and has served faithfully on the board of Reformed Fellowship with Henry, finally was taken home to heaven, also after a long, trying battle with cancer.

And so the thought occurred to me: What will Thanksgiving look like for these families? In a time of intense suffering and the pain of loss, how will they celebrate Thanksgiving?

Probably for the same reasons and in the same ways the Pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving did it. During the previous winter, the Pilgrims' first in this cold new world, the townspeople Pilgrims, who knew little of hunting and fishing, ate five kernels of Indian corn a day per person. They read their Bibles and sang Psalms and huddled together in their little ship in blankets to keep warm. When their numbers began to succumb to cold and disease and started dying, they buried the dead in unmarked graves at night so that the Indians wouldn't know how many of their number had been lost. By the end of the winter only 57 Pilgrims and half the crew remained. Half of their party were gone. Probably every person who lived had been touched by death.

And yet months later, those that had continued living, planting, harvesting, worshiping, and laying the foundations for what would become the greatest nation on the earth--in spite of tremendous loss--established a holiday of thanksgiving to God that would continue to this day. A children's book we have says that the Pilgrims thanked God for carrying them across the sea, for keeping them through the winter, for their Indian friends, for their harvest, for living in a place where they were free to worship according to their consciences. And I'm sure those godly Pilgrims were truly thankful to God for all of those things, because they recognized them as His good and perfect gifts--gifts that enabled them to live and prosper. And yet the fact remains that most of them had not even been separated a year from loved ones who lay in unmarked graves--husbands, wives, children--leaving broken hearts that surely could not have been healed in such a short time.

And that's where these modern Pilgrims have something in common with those Plymouth Pilgrims in facing a Thanksgiving that is less than what they would have liked it to be. In spite of their loss, they know that there is something to be far more thankful for than simply the creature comforts the Lord provides, as wonderful as they are. They can be thankful that death does not have the final word, that one day they will enjoy eternal Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims who have gone on before. They can say in their hearts, "Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits--who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's" (Psalm 103:1-5).

Perhaps the truest, most meaningful Thanksgiving comes when we know just what we have been delivered from, when we realize that even gratitude itself is a gift from the One who is the giver of all good gifts, the One who provides hope in suffering and the promise that one day our suffering will be a distant memory, as all of us Pilgrims join in a forever feast.

O God, our help in ages past,
Our help for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.