I’m particularly excited for this year’s holiday because it stands in such stark contrast to last year’s. For that, I’d like to go ahead and give thanks. 

This time last year, my sister, Kaysie, and I were in the midst of one of the longest years of our lives. We spent much of 2007 making hard decisions about the care of our father, whose myriad addictions had caught up to him. We were beset by one emergency after another, involving no small amount of hastily planned of cross-country travel. Long story, a novel-in-waiting. (Or a movie–“The Savages” has uncanny parallels.) Thanksgiving, which we spent at my sister’s home in Tulsa, was particularly difficult for a host of reasons. A few days later, my father died. During that same week, we lost two more family members. 

That’s a whiff of the story of 2007. I wrote about it in brief for YouthWorker Journal earlier this year, and I’ll try to dig that article up in another post. 

Life has times of intense blessing, and times of intense hardship. I’m not sure I’ve yet learned the art of living through either, but I’m working on it. For now, in advance of an extended Thanksgiving that I’ll begin to observe in a few hours, I want to express gratitude for the intense blessing of this moment. We’re healthy. We’re together. We’ve mourned a lot, and it’s time to celebrate a lot. Over the next week, we’re going to eat fried chicken and a pot of green chili, plus traditional Thanksgiving delights (with splashes of new dishes from Bon Appetit); we’re going to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and Elf, and, while Mom babysits, take in the new Baz Luhrmann film. Weather allowing, we’ll hike a trail or two, and, a different kind of weather allowing, go sledding. 

It stands to be a blessed week, more blessed than I deserve. I’m already thankful.