What Giving Thanks Can Bring

During the Depression, William Stidger was in a restaurant with friends who were all talking about how terrible things were: suffering people, rich people committing suicide, joblessness. The conversation got more miserable as it went on.

A minister in the group interrupted. “In two or three weeks I have to preach a sermon on Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “What can I say that’s affirmative in a period of world depression like this?”

Stidger felt the Spirit of God saying to him, “Why don’t you give thanks to those people who have been a blessing in your life and affirm them during this terrible time?”

He began to think about that. He remembered a schoolteacher who was very dear to him, a wonderful teacher of poetry and English literature who had gone out of her way to put a great love of literature and verse in him, which has affected all his writings and his preaching. So he sat down and wrote a letter to this woman, now up in years. It was only a matter of days until he got a reply in the feeble scrawl of the aged:

My dear Willy,
I can’t tell you how much your note meant to me. I am in my 80s, living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely, and like the last leaf of autumn lingering behind. You’ll be interested to know that I taught in school for more than fifty years, and yours is the first note of appreciation I ever received. It came on a blue, cold morning, and it cheered me as nothing has done in many years.

“I’m not sentimental, but I found myself weeping over that note,” Stidger said. Then he thought of a kind bishop, now retired, who had recently faced the death of his wife and was all alone. This bishop had taken a lot of time giving Stidger advice and counsel and love when he first began his ministry. So he sat down and wrote the old bishop. In two days a reply came back.

My dear Will,
Your letter was so beautiful, so real, that as I sat reading it in my study, tears of gratitude fell from my eyes. Before I realized what I was doing, I rose from my chair and I called my wife’s name to share it with her, forgetting she was gone. You’ll never know how much your letter has warmed my spirit. I have been walking around in the glow of your letter all day long.

 — David A. Seamands, “Instruction for Thanksgiving,” Preaching Today Audio, no. 62

Praising Even At Their Bleakest

One winter I sat in army fatigues somewhere near Anniston, Alabama, eating my supper out of a mess kit. The infantry training battalion that I had been assigned to was on bivouac. There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down.

I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had left something that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip. When I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me. I missed the catch, and the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it, mud and all.

Time deepened and slowed down. With a lurch of the heart, I saw suddenly that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months was good.

Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.

 — Frederick Buechner, 
The Sacred Journey (HarperOne, 1991)

Joy That Was Hard Won

Honesty is always the best policy, especially when you are surrounded by women in a restroom during a break at a Christian women’s conference. One woman, putting on lipstick, said, “Oh, Joni, you always look so together, so happy in your wheelchair. I wish that I had your joy!” Several women around her nodded. “How do you do it?” she asked as she capped her lipstick.

“I don’t do it,” I said. “May I tell you honestly how I woke up this morning?

“This is an average day. After my husband, Ken, leaves for work at 6:00 a.m., I’m alone until I hear the front door open at 7:00 a.m. That’s when a friend arrives to get me up. While she makes coffee, I pray, ‘Lord, my friend will soon give me a bath, get me dressed, sit me up in my chair, brush my hair and teeth, and send me out the door. I don’t have the strength to face this routine one more time. I have no resources. I don’t have a smile to take into the day. But you do. May I have yours? God, I need you desperately.’ ”

“So what happens when your friend comes into the bedroom?” one of them asked.

“I turn my head toward her and give her a smile sent straight from heaven. It’s not mine; it’s God’s.” I point to my paralyzed legs. “Whatever joy you see today was hard won this morning.”

I have learned that the weaker we are, the more we need to lean on God; and the more we lean on God, the stronger we find him to be.

 — Joni Eareckson Tada, “Joy Hard Won,” Decision (March 2000)