Dear Subscriber,
I hope you're having a wonderful day and I hope you had an even more wonderful Thanksgiving!
I'm a little embarrassed to say that in all my previous twenty-sevenThanksgivings, I had never had a truly thankful one until 1983. My first thankful Thanksgiving was just three years after my move to Wyoming. So much had changed since those first happy days of my arrival. I had married, moved, fallen from my pinnacle of exciting new life into a new life of despair. From the depths of that despair, that autumn I heard about Jesus, who came to redeem the world and me. I believed what I heard about Him.
From the inside out, my life began to change. One of the first noticeable changes was being thankful despite less than ideal circumstances.
That Thanksgiving, sitting at the table, looking at a deer roast and a bowl of peas, I breathed a heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving for the tiny meal. The snow was piled high outside, increasing by the hour and we were warm in the kitchen. We didn't have much in the way of groceries.
In the old run down ranch house we were staying in outside of Glendo, blankets had been hung on the doorways to keep the heat from the Franklin stove in the kitchen. We slept on the floor at night because it was the only warm room. We were snowed in under about three feet of snow.
Our days had been spent tramping around finding dead cottonwood branches on the ground and hauling them back to the house and then chopping them up with an ax. It was our only source of heat and it kept us busy all day.
But you know, I was truly thankful, for the first time in my life. Not because I was afraid, but because I wasn’t afraid. I was thankful because I realized that Thanksgiving meal and the firewood and all that we had, however little it might be, came from the Provider and He was providing for me, as He always had done, even when I hadn’t recognized or acknowledged it.
It was a few days later that we heard the sound of a tractor coming through the thigh high snow, making a path. Then we saw a pickup behind the tractor. In it were new friends from the tiny church we had been introduced to. They had been worried about us and had come to convince us to come to town.
I didn’t want to go. Flooded with mixed feelings, wanting to stay because that’s how I’d always done things; on my own without help, I reluctantly agreed. I was quite naive and fiercely independent, not seeing any real need. Wisdom prevailed and we packed up a few things and the dogs and went to stay with the family of one of the rescuers. It was humbling.
I hadn’t realized that in the process of coming to faith, I’d be part of a new family and community also. It was a completely new experience and caused a lot of tears, mostly gratitude, mixed with some overwhelm, humility and a little fear.
Things have improved drastically since that year and I'm happy to say there's another first about to happen.
