Thanks for you~ (Nov 19-26)

This week’s snapshots:

Happy Saturday, my dear humans!

I hope you have had a lovely and restful Thanksgiving weekend - we worked a part-time week in two days and then I got to zip up to North Dakota to spend some time with the fam! It’s been nice to stop working and play board games with people who love you and whom you love.

Since Thanksgiving was always just another Thursday, the best excuse to go visit our American friends in Germany, or a kitschy excuse to weaponize gratitude lists while I was growing up, I’ve been wondering how to celebrate it now in a way that connects me to thankfulness.

Because when I take the time to think about the goodnesses I get to experience in life - falling asleep to the overwhelming giggles of young men every night on the road, sharing roadtrip candies with my cousins, relaxing my exhausted body on a couch while aunties and uncles chatter to me about what brings them joy or sorrow - I find how good it is to even exist.

“People don’t need to learn something new,” I hear Dan Koe repeat in my ear, “they need to be reminded of what they already know.”

While this isn’t an answer to how I can remind myself what I already know - that the people walking this timeline at the same time, in the same place, in the same spirit as you are life’s greatest treasure - it is the reminder that helps me to slow down and really see people. To lay aside the churning to-do list hanging over me like boiling oil in a tipping pot and let violent giggles, Noah Kahan playlists, and plenteous board games be the way I see God’s loving presence in my life - in this very moment.

But since I want to be honest - none of that was my actual Thanksgiving experience. My actual Thursday was spent claustrophobic as children under the age of 5 shrieked like banshees and aunties and uncles screamed back to try and make them stop “being little sh*ts.” The exhaustion from the 30 hours in two days was amplified by a short night’s sleep on the couch where I was awoken by clanking in the kitchen before the sun was up. I was experiencing overwhelm, not gratitude, on Thursday.

So when I found the 1970s Scrooge musical playing in the living room where I was going to be sleeping, I wasn’t actually disappointed. It gave me the perfect excuse to set up my bed and just lay, to try recovering from Monday and Tuesday with a story that didn’t require any brainpower. Except… it’s my favorite version of the story and I absolutely watched the whole thing instead of drifting to sleep.

Schwartz is absolutely right about Dickens’ tale. But while I am not a business owner and cannot relate to underpaying my employees, I absolutely relate to the misery of miserliness. When the ghost of Christmas Present began to sing, 🎶I like life, life likes me, life and I fairly fully agree🎶 I threw up a little bit in my mouth. And when he continued with, 🎶Life is fine, life is good, ‘specially mine which is just as it should (be)🎶 I was 100% with Scrooge. “Bah! Humbug!” My belly was warm and full, and my heart should have been too because of who I’m with and the free trip that brought me here and the paid vacations I’m looking forward to - but instead I was 🎶hating people,🎶 and 🎶loathing people,🎶 and the person I found most despicable was me.

But even in that moment, Scrooge’s heart and mine were changing. The dramatic irony of 🎶thank you very much,🎶 hit me with about the same force as Scrooge’s hell-chains. And when Scrooge awakens after his visit from Christmas Future and his heart is changed and he can sing, truthfully, 🎶I like life, life likes me, life and I fairly fully agree🎶 I cried. And when he experiences the fullness of his transformation and instigates the entire town to sing, 🎶Thank you very much/ Thank you very much! That’s the nicest thing that anyone’s ever done for me!/ it sounds a bit bizarre/ but things the way they are/ I feel as if another life’s begun for me!🎶 I decided that is how I want to celebrate Thanksgiving. Yes (as every American has tried to explain to me) it’s a federal excuse to enjoy family and food - but more than that, it’s a reminder of what I already know: that God is good, that goodness has a particular way of transforming the world around it, and I can put on my eyes to see that particular way in my world! It’s not the terror of the ghosts that transforms Scrooge, but the jubilant realization that he can live the good life Christ purchased! 

I don’t know what it is that you already know about your fragile existence that you need reminding of, but I would love it if, when you remember, you would send me an email and remind me too.

May you experience God’s goodness in both the triumphs and disappointments of this weekend,

Beth