Day of Thanksgiving

11/28/2013

Psalm 122:1-5 (NRSV)

I was glad when they said to me,
"Let us go to the house of the LORD!"
Our feet are standing
within your gates, O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem — built as a city
that is bound firmly together.
To it the tribes go up,
the tribes of the LORD,
as was decreed for Israel,
to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
For there the thrones for judgment were set up,
the thrones of the house of David. 

I write this in between going to the house of the Lord for Thanksgiving Eve worship and going to the house of my mother for Thanksgiving dinner.  Both places I am bound to firmly, not really of my own doing, but by virtue of grace and gift.  And for both connections I feel a deep gratitude.  Neither of them are the places I live, but both are places I can call home.

This is the time of year and the day especially, when we look with gratitude on what we have been given - things, people in our lives, experiences that have molded us, and places that have made us home.

It is places this year that are on my mind mostly as I give thanks.  I am thankful for those homes, not my own, but yet still houses where I can feel warmth and hospitality and connection: places I have stayed for rest and places I have stayed for nostalgic reasons.  Places where I haven't been in a while, and places I know I can go to at anytime.  Though my childhood home is no longer available to me, I have the homes of my parents - one far and one near, where I can know I will still feel I belong.

But mostly the place of the Lord.  Church.  Not, this year, the church where I spent the last 17 years, but a church instead where I have been called.  That is a new and exciting kind of home: a place where new relationships are being formed connected by the one relationship that makes all things possible.  

There is much to be grateful for there!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Good and gracious and generous God, we give you so much thanks for all that we have and all that you make possible.  Thank you for connections, new and old, to places and to people that you have put in our lives.  Help us in those connections to move ever closer to you.  Amen.