Tag: family

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Relationships

With Thanks

To my readers in Slovakia and places other than the U.S., Thanksgiving Day, always the fourth Thursday in November, is one of the biggest and grandest holidays in the U.S. The featured image is representative of what will be repeated thousands upon thousands of times this next Thrusday as families, often multi-generational, will gather around a table to share an elaborate meal together.

According to the Transportation Security Adminsitration, 30 million Americans will fly between November 17 and 28. The American Automobile Association estimates 49.1 million will drive more than 50 miles to their holiday destination.

While the majority of the populaton will celebrate is some way, there will be other millions of people without family with whom to spend Thanksgiving Day for dozens of reasons – broken relationships, deaths, illness, incarceration, homelessness, lack of family or lack of resources – to name a few.

Many are anticipating the day and others dreading it. Some will create new and treasured memories and others will have painful experieces they want to forget.

Personally, I am planning to drive 25 miles to spend the day at my sister’s home with six other members of my extended family. However, there have been many years I have spent Thanksgiving Day without family. At times I have been alone. Sometimes I have shared the day with friends and at other times not celebrated at all.

Wherever I am and whoever is with me, I want most of all to say from the depths of my being, “I am glad to be me here with you.” There is no greater joy than to have the three aspects of that statement combined and filling my time and space: being glad to be me; being glad to be here; being glad to be with you.

I am glad to be me

God created me in His image, placed me in a particular family, in a certain place, at a specific time in history. Everything I have had, have now or will have is from His hand. I am grateful for all of it. Most of all, because of Jesus, God gave me a new life in Him and purpose. As deeply flawed as I am, I know I am loved and accepted by Him and have no one to please but Him. Even when I am most disappointed in myself, most selfish, most unloveable, I am still glad to be me because I know I am forgiven and God will patently correct me. For those of you who can say the same, you are as blessed as I am. For those who cannot say this yet, it is still possible for you.

I am glad to be here

I am thankful to be here at this moment in time. I am equally glad to be wherever the “here ” is in space. The joy of that is I am not longing to be somewhere else. I can be present in the moment. I can carry a sense that there is meaning and purpose in being where I am right now. It has not always been so. God had to teach me many lessons before I could say honestly and consistently “I am glad to be here.”

I am glad to be with you

God is relational and He created us for relationships with Him and with one another. Whoever you are, when I am with you I am grateful. The moment we have together in any place will not be repeated. Any next time we have, I will be different and you will be different. Maybe part of what will change us is our being together.

I was not always able to say this. There are still so many lessons I must learn about relatonships. But if I believe God has a purpose in our being together – whatever that may be and though I may not understand – then I want to be grateful and glad to be with you.

Even on a Thanksgiving Day when I was sad, hurt, and without human company, because Jesus was with me I could say, “I’m glad to be me here with you.” In fact, He says that to us.

My prayer

Father, whether this Thursday is a special day to some or an ordinary day to others, may those who read this be able to say with gratitude to you they are glad to be who they are. If they cannot, please bring them to that place. May you also give them the ability to see meaning and purpose in where they are. In their relationsips, whether difficult or serene or joyous, may they give and grow in ways that produce thankfulness. I ask these things in the name of Jesus.

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Relationships

From One Generation to the Next

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

Frankin Delano Roosevelt

It’s been more than eight weeks since I last posted on this blog. Between the last post and this one, I spent four weeks in Slovakia. The trip to Slovakia was my first time back in thirteen years and fourteen years since we, Joe Ann and I, moved back to the U.S.

I planned the trip because I had finished my memoir of our time there and I wanted to thank those Slovaks who partnered with us for twelve years and see what had happened in the lives of those we knew and loved over these intervening years.

Several days after returning to Michigan, I attended an afternoon reunion with more than half of my living cousins on my dad’s side of the family. The cousins are the children of five out of nine siblings, none of whom are living today. They came from Western Canada, Washington, and North Carolina, as well as several cities in Michigan, to spend a few hours together.

I am still processing the many experiences in Slovakia, but it is what I saw and heard that was similar to my time with cousins that has prompted my reflections today. The cousins attending the reunion are in a close age range to one another, and all of us spent some of the most significant years of our lives in the same church. I couldn’t help but notice how the legacy of family and church shaped our lives, was prominent in our memories, and seemed to direct so much of our conversation.

Time flew by too quickly, and we were reluctant to part ways. I left, feeling warmly enveloped in a soft, comforting blanket of familiarity. It made me realize how fortunate we are to possess what was bestowed upon us many years ago, a rarity in itself. However, out of the five families of aunts and uncles represented at the reunion, there was not a single family in which we grew up where the children, upon becoming adults, stayed in the same city and church. We moved into our different worlds.

Our biographies in our formative years intersected history at different times than our parents’, and our children’s lives are intersecting history in times we could never have imagined. Our parents could not construct our future any more than we can build the future for our children or grandchildren. Yet we had some of the same tools to help build a solid foundation for them. Growing up in families with two parents who love the Lord, being active and supported in a community of faith, is a major part of that foundation.

During my time in Slovakia, and particularly my visit to the church in Banská Bystrica, I felt immense gratitude and joy in witnessing the same legacy of faith and family passed from grandparents, who are my age or a little younger, to their children – now grown with children of their own – and to their grandchildren. The worlds of each of the generations have changed greatly as they have moved from under a totalitarian government and Marxist economy to a different system of government and economy. While I witnessed many visible changes, I saw what was most important in the church. Because they know the unchanging Jesus, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, each generation is prepared to meet their own time in a changing world.

I see and know that there are many from every generation among us who do not possess the same legacy as I and many of my family have been blessed with. Yet, as members within the larger family of God, we have the opportunity to invest in and help build a legacy for others and their children. May we all share the richness of our experience with those whose lives we touch.