Happy Thanksgiving!
Truly we have much to be thankful for this year and especially today. As many of you know, or may have read in headlines recently, things are not so peaceful in our neck of the woods. As it turns out, even if we wanted to go home for Thanksgiving, we literally would not be able to fly out of this country. Please join with us in praying for a peaceful resolution to the problems that are gathering steam here.
Speaking of gathering steam, we’ve spent the last several days preparing for our Thanksgiving feast. There’s always the opportunity here, because of lack of understanding of foreign holidays, to just choose to have a quiet, private Thanksgiving meal. Hoping, of course, that nobody happens to drop by as you’re saying a prayer over the elaborate meal that you’ve prepared only for yourselves. Last year was our first year to invite friends to celebrate the day with us and it was a blessing that we decided to duplicate this year. A few weeks ago Jeremy and I were casually discussing plans for the day. We came to the conclusion that we would need to invite a bigger crowd this year, twice the size. I’ll admit that I was a little concerned by this proposition, especially since we would have no family here this year to help us with the cooking. I even prayed that if we wouldn’t be able to handle it all, that the Lord would prevent us from finding all the ingredients and pans etc that we would need. Well, God works in mysterious ways and it turned out that we were able to find EVERYTHING we needed, without any problem and at a cheaper price than we expected. I thanked the Lord for answering my prayer and then I prayed for the strength I’d need to put it all together. There were a few things that I didn’t have that I wished I did, but the Lord provided them, in their simpler forms: instead of canned sweet potatoes I had a huge bag of 50 that needed to be cleaned, baked, peeled and mashed. Instead of canned pumpkin I had 3 pumpkins that my neighbor had given me, that needed to be cut open, cleaned, steamed and mashed. Instead of two sons who would sit obediently at the table and color hand-print turkeys while I made stuffing, I had two energized, wild boys that almost escaped across the soccer field next to our house while the turkeys were roasting. One of my greatest blessings of the day was a friend named Ratana who came early and helped till the last dish was dried. What a blessing it was to have such a wonderful friend. She sliced onions, fried onions, peeled apples, stirred green beans and washed dishes. She was my Thanksgiving angel.
In all we had 17 guests and they ate almost 2 whole turkeys. According to Betty Crocker they were only supposed to eat 1 ½, but I guess Betty doesn’t take into account the lack of meat in the Asian diet! We have about half of our side dishes left over and lots of pumpkin pie, apparently they wanted to be warned ahead of time that dessert was coming.
I think the most special part of the meal was the time we had when everyone shared something that they were thankful for. This tradition might seem old-fashioned and empty to some but it was a blessing for us to hear the voices of our friends lifted in Thanksgiving to the Lord. Marriages mending, friendships reunited, faith found, sickness healed, so many reasons to be thankful.
May you be blessed this day with a heart full of thanksgiving and joy.
