To BE Grateful

In my own life there are many things for which I have expressed thanks, and then forgotten: gifts, favors, blessings, compliments, each appreciated in the moment, and then stored away in some distant compartment of my memory and virtually forgotten. Sometimes I remember the gift, but not the giver. 

Other times I remember the giver, but not the gift. I can still tell you who was at my wedding, but not what they gave me. Likewise, I can also tell you who stuck with me through the unraveling of that same marriage, but not be able to detail all the specific ways they supported me.

There are also many blessings that I simply take for granted: clean water, a roof over my head, friends and family, freedom of speech, the ability to read, sufficient food, electricity; the list goes on and on. It is a character hazard of being born in the wealthiest country in the world. 

The perennial Thanksgiving hymn Now Thank We All Our God begins with the words of its title, and then goes on to finish the thought: "with hearts and hands and voices." Expressing gratitude is significantly more complex than the mandatory please and thank yous of good manners. It is a commitment akin to learning to play an instrument or training to run a marathon. You can't flip a switch and become a grateful person; you have to live into it.

So how does one go about living into it, to thanking God with heart, hands and voice?  I love these words from Thomas Merton:

"To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.

Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference."

Experience God and you will know gratitude. Look for God's loving work in the world everywhere and ascribe all that is good to God and you will live into gratitude. And all whom you encounter will be a little more grateful too, especially your children.

Your children will not learn of God's goodness through your telling of it (though that will help to point them in the right direction) but rather through their own experience. Help them to experience God by teaching them to recognize their blessings, their gifts, and the love behind those gifts. Make gratitude as least as much a part of your Thanksgiving as turkey, stuffing, cranberries, potatoes, pie and football.

Even if it is not your family’s practice to give thanks before or after meals, do so on this day. Even if you are unaccustomed to free and unscripted prayer, use this occasion for a popcorn prayer – where every person gathered for this special meal shares his or her awareness of a blessing.  Baby steps toward a life of gratitude. Thank God.

The Season of Holidays

My Christmas cactus is in full bloom. A bit ahead of schedule, but happily reminding me that the season of holidays is upon us.

I am not a good plant person so the fact that this cactus has survived in spite of me, and bloomed for a second year, gives me great joy. It's an old plant, one that my mother has tended for many years.

As I think about hope and the coming holidays, and the impact they have on your children and your families, I am struck by my cactus and how perfectly it captures so many seasonal themes: waiting, hoping, joy, new life, change of seasons, gift.

The first buds will appear as the days shorten and the nights lengthen. You'll first see tiny dots of color on the ends of the plant. You may not even be positive they are buds for several days. And even when you are certain, it will be hard to believe they can possibly produce the large flowers the plant will eventually sport. Can you see that tiny spot of pink right in the center of the photo? That bud is probably two weeks from the full bloom you see just to the left of it. Children will be fascinated to watch it change. And the change is visible almost daily. In many ways it is like waiting for a child to be born. Great anticipation, coupled with the knowledge that there is nothing to be done to hasten or slow the progress. It has its own life, its own schedule. It is outside of your control, yet you can love it, tend it, watch it and water it, and see it change almost before your very eyes. It is exciting to watch and wait.

Eventually the bud will look like the one in the center of this photo. It is still so filled with potential: we know that the bud in the center will eventually become the blossom on the left, but we can also recognize its beauty in the moment. If all you ever got to see was the tightly furled bud, the contrast of the pink and green would still be a thing of beauty. Unique.  No two blossoms are ever exactly the same.

So I commend the Christmas cactus to you as a tool for teaching yourself and your children the rhythms of life, for teaching hope. It can slow life down to a natural pace. It can remind us that the true joys of this season are all tied up in that first gift of the Child. It adds a time of hope to our seasons. Hope that combines waiting with faith. There is no instant gratification. It is not the stuff of department store Santas who make promises they aren't bound to keep. Rather, it is the expectation that change will come, and faith that what will come will be good.

Holiday Travels: Disorientation

My train journey started about 40 minutes behind schedule. How?!

The train started in San Antonio, and only made one stop before arriving in Austin. I, and many other passengers were impatient to begin our journey. We discussed our reservations about the train - the fact that it took five hours to get to Dallas where we could drive in just over three hours concerned us. And now we were starting behind schedule. . .

The train arrived and it felt like it took forever to board the 75 passengers waiting at the station. One by one we found our cars, stowed our luggage, and found our seats. Then we were off, and before we had gotten very far along the way, time somehow ceased to matter much at all. I didn't have a time-table, and found it relaxing not to check the time.

On to Fort Worth, then to Dallas, then on to Mineola, Longview, Marshall, and Texarkana. It was dark by the time we reached the Arkansas border. Once the sun was down, time on the train became even less important - it was impossible to tell if it was 8pm or midnight. We were far from city lights and any activity that might give a clue to the time. At some point everyone seemed to settle down to read or sleep and it grew quieter and darker as the miles passed.

By the time we reached Little Rock we were only 15 minutes behind schedule. Sleep was disrupted by a large number of passengers boarding, but only for a little while. I dozed off again just as we left the city limits. The next time I woke it was completely dark; every reading light had been extinguished and there were tall trees practically touching the windows of the train. We could have been in a tunnel. I groped for my phone and found the time, but no location. It was unsettling but I was awake enough to reason that we were someplace in Arkansas without cell phone service so I just went back to sleep. This pattern repeated throughout the night and I became as disengaged from my location as I had from time - I could have been in outer space, or on a camel, following a moving star across a desert. I was in God's hands, on God's time.

The only time I have been similarly disoriented was in the early days of each of my daughters' lives. Nursing in the middle of the night, sleeping in the middle of the day, I remember more than once looking at a clock that said 6:00 and not knowing if it was morning or evening. That phase is fairly short for most parents and children. Only a few years after nursing and before children reach driving age, the airline mode of travel becomes the rule; everything has an extremely specific schedule and location.Whether you are traveling by train, plane, or automobile with your children right now, enjoy the journey. You'll arrive at your destination before you know it!

Holiday Travels: Home for the Holidays

Join me on the train again. . .

Here's what greeted Heather when she arrived.

My first seatmate on the journey was Heather. Heather was a bubbly 18-year-old college freshman from a small town east of Dallas. This was her first trip home from San Antonio since school started in August. She was as wriggly as a preschool child in her excitement. By the time she left the train I knew all about her, her parents, her brothers and sisters, and even the names and ages of her nieces and nephews. She was heading home to her family.

I was headed away from my home, toward my daughter's home. She has a new home, one I hadn't seen yet. I was almost as excited as Heather to be spending the holiday with my family. It made me think about how children come home for the holidays, and then one day you realize they are actually going home after the holidays. Your home is no longer their home; they have been visiting.

It's not an instant thing, this switch from coming home to going home and I expect it happens as many different ways as there are people. There's no single point at which the place you live becomes your home instead of your house, but once it has happened, your childhood home, the home of your parents, is no longer your own home.

Being home for Christmas is a major wish for many people. Going home for Christmas is a major stress for others - partly because not everyone in a family agrees where home is. There are no easy answers. Still, Christmas is the celebration of Love coming to us, so whether you are in a house in Houston, a condo in Colorado, or a tent in Tanzania, whether you are going home, or staying home, I wish you Love.

Holiday Travels

Two days before Thanksgiving I began my holiday travels by boarding the Texas Eagle for a trip to the Midwest to visit my daughters for Thanksgiving. I have been longing to make this train trip for many years and was thankful for the opportunity to finally do it. Austin to Chicago takes about 28 hours each way; that is ample time for visiting, snoozing, reading, and thinking. At the end of this journey I  have lots of stories, ideas, reflections, and observations to share so beginning today, and continuing through New Year's Day I plan to share them with shorter, and more frequent posts.  All aboard - let's take a trip!

The first thing that struck me was the complete absence of responsibility I had on this trip. I wasn't in charge of the schedule, the meals, the stops along the way, fueling the engines, or making sure the staff got along. This was a very new experience for me, and seemed an exceptionally great way to start the holidays. All I had to do was board the train and the rest was up to them. I had some non-critical decisions to make: I could eat what I brought, go to the snack car, or splurge on a full meal in the dining car; I could read this book or that magazine or play games on my computer; I could talk to the person next to me, someone in the observation car, or no one at all. None of these decisions was worthy of worry.

This got me to thinking about all the things we fret about around the holidays: where to go, what to eat, whether to order it or make it, who to invite, to have a real or fake tree, to attend this or that or the other event or party. We can work ourselves into a frenzy over a lot of things that don't have watershed consequences during the holidays. We want to create Christmas memories for our kids, but much of what we remember most happily from Christmas past was not orchestrated by anyone. Maybe it was the ice storm that shut down travel in all directions and left us huddled around the fireplace with nothing but candlelight and cookies for our Christmas supper. Perhaps it was the gift we didn't even know we wanted until we received it, or the way the Christmas story flooded our hearts at the annual Christmas pageant.

I know it's counter-intuitive, but I want to suggest that you may make the best Christmas memories for your children by letting go of some control and making a few spontaneous decisions. It seems scary but the One whose birth we celebrate is the Engineer on this train. A scrap of scripture comes to mind. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. (I Peter 5:7) Let the Lord know your fears and anxieties as you go into the holiday season, and then let go and enjoy the ride!

The Serving Season

Serving food, serving drinks, serving the hungry in soup kitchens, and serving our neighbors are regular hallmarks of the "extreme season." All around the church and community people are lining up volunteers and asking for donations of money,  gift cards, time, and patience. At home, this may begin to take a toll if your heart is bigger than your available hours or dollars. I remember a lot of years where I was just plain mad all through the holidays because I felt like a failure on every front - everyone needed more from me than I had to give. I used to think this was because I was a single parent on a tight budget but I have since learned that almost everyone feels this way at some point during the holidays. Here are a few things I figured out along the way:

• Start by deciding how much money you will give ahead of time and then, as a family, DECIDE where you'll give it. Some families pick one thing and stick with it year after year but others like to mix it up and give to a lot of places. Your family members may not all agree so you may have to divide the budgeted funds between several causes. That discussion will be almost as rewarding as the giving. Depending on the ages and temperaments of your children there may be spirited debates over the merits of buying dog food for the animal shelter or toys for children whose parents are in prison. People may get passionate but that's OK - it's for a good cause!
• Choose ONE actual hands on service project. Giving money is very helpful to recipients but less valuable to your children who really won't fully grasp the giving of money until they have earned some themselves. If your children are very small, substitute for a Meals-On-Wheels driver and take them along. Take older kids to wrap gifts at Blue Santa, help an elderly neighbor put up a tree or some lights, or serve dinner  at a soup kitchen. Wherever you serve, serve together.
• Find a way to participate at church. Welcome guests, make cookies for the choir members who will sing multiple services on Christmas Eve, help carry all those poinsettias into the church - or offer to deliver them to shut-ins after the Christmas Day services. Check to see if someone could use a ride to church. Sing in the choir or play in the orchestra. Even offer to stay and lock up the building after the last service! Take some of your baking to a family who has had health issues or recently lost a loved one. Serving at church helps reinforce for your kids that it's really all about THE BABY.
• Don't do things you, or your family, resent. If traveling to see relatives is more chore than joy - stay home! Go another time when you can enjoy it more.  Hate sending Christmas cards but want to stay in touch? Send a New Year's letter or a valentine or write a generic letter that can be sent with birthday cards.

I think it's easy to feel like you're in a rubber raft about to go over a waterfall as the holidays approach but try not to lose sight of the countless blessings in your life and the baby in the manger.  Holding those things at the center can help you float a little more gently down the holiday river.

Counting Blessings

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. When I was a kid, it was the only major holiday we had away from home because, for pastor's families, Christmas and Easter are always spent at home. But every Thanksgiving, we would go to church on Wednesday night and then leave for the grandparents' immediately after the service. It seemed to take forever (Google maps says that it was only about 3 hours) and we inevitably fell asleep in the car and awoke in our familiar room at Grandma's house with wonderful smells wafting up from the kitchen on Thanksgiving morning. In my little girl memories it snowed every year; this is probably incorrect but it is how I remember it. We would leave home in cold, wet, brown fall and wake up to untouched winter white splendor.


Before we fell asleep we always played the Thanksgiving version of the Alphabet Game in the car. Instead of I'm going on a trip and I'm taking a ___________ we would scramble to find something to be thankful for starting with each letter of the alphabet. (I know - this was sooooo little house on the prairie!) Thirty years later I became the driver and we played the same game over many long Thanksgiving road trips. And this year, on the night before Thanksgiving, I plan to fall asleep chanting "I am thankful for Austin's weirdness, I am thankful for books, I am thankful for church, and dogs, and Emily, and friends, and Gracie, and holidays, and", well, you get the idea. I could repeat this litany many times, changing every item - I am blessed beyond any deserving.

Most of us are blessed beyond measure and, as we barrel toward the ultimate consumer holiday, it is fitting that we stop and count up what we already have. It is the season of Thanks, and it's immediately followed by the season of Giving. Giving, not Getting.

I think it's easier for children to turn their attention toward giving if they are mindful of what they already have. So, after you have given Thanks, eaten turkey and dressing and cranberries and watched some football, I have a suggestion. Count your blessings. Then consider joining the Advent Conspiracy. You can check it out here:

Let your kids help you figure out who really could use a gift. Then, let them help pick it out. Or let them help figure out what to skip so that you can give more away. The video says it all - $10 Billion could solve the world's water issues. I am thankful that I can walk into my kitchen, turn on the tap and find clean water flowing out of it. Hot or cold - whatever I want! Next year, wouldn't it be awesome if we could be thankful that people all over the world have clean water?