What Are You Thankful For?

Next week we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is not an official Christian holiday but we usually do hold special services to commemorate it. We will be doing that here at 7 p.m. on Wednesday the 23rd and then we are going to have a Pie Social afterward. So if you are in the area join us for worship and some pie. I will be conducting the worship service and I preaching on how thankful we are to be, that is usually what pastor’s do for Thanksgiving services. I am not staying for the Pie Social though because I have to be in San Diego for Thanksgiving with my extended family. So we will be leaving a few minutes after the benediction. I am actually looking forward to the drive because I know the kids will fall asleep quickly and I won’t have to stop for sixteen potty breaks between here and California. Plus I like to drive at night when everyone is asleep, it lets me think my own thoughts and not be disturbed. Our CD player and radio went out in the van awhile ago so there will be no music either. It will just be me, the headlights, the ribbon of road, some wildlife and maybe a few illegal aliens trying to sneak across I-8 in the middle of the night. I have never seen that yet on the drive, although I often look over into Mexico at times when we are near the border. Whenever I see the hills of Mexico off in the distance I am reminded of Clint Eastwood in all those spaghetti westerns, which were really filmed in Italy, hence the name spaghetti western, but always seemed to end up in some dusty little village in Mexico. But that’s another topic, back to Thanksgiving.
I am looking forward to Thanksgiving because I am going to spend it with a large part of my family this year. That hasn’t always been the case for me. I have spent a number of Thanksgivings in other places in the country without family. I always had friends mind you but family was thousands of miles away. Over the years I have spent Thanksgiving with close friends in Nebraska, with congregation members in Michigan, North Dakota, and Indiana, all of them nice but not the same as with family. I had three Thanksgivings that were to say the least strange. The strangest one was in Cambridge England when I was going to school there. It occurred to my friend and I that the Brit’s don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We didn’t know what to do. The Brits somehow picked up on our confusion and threw a Thanksgiving dinner for us with all the trimmings. That was nice, I still remember that. I don’t remember much about the dinner but I do remember with great thankfulness their hospitality and what it meant to my friend and me. I spent another Thanksgiving in a restaurant in North Dakota. I was supposed to join a farmer and his family for Thanksgiving but the night before it snowed two feet and they shut everything down. North Dakotans are a resilient group though and someone talked to someone who talked to someone else who arranged for the entire town to eat Thanksgiving dinner at the local diner together. There were 250 people in the town so it was a little confusing but again, it was wonderful. I will never forget my Thanksgiving on the road though. It was also in North Dakota but several years before the one I just talked about and before I was a pastor. Another friend and I left Idaho together, he was headed for graduate school at North Dakota State in Fargo and I was headed to Seminary in Fort Wayne Indiana. He was going to start after Christmas break and I was going to start after Thanksgiving break and so we decided to drive out together in the bad weather. We got caught in a horrible snow storm right before Jamestown North Dakota, in which we came very close to getting killed, and so we ended up staying the night there. The next day was Thanksgiving. As we filled up at the gas station we both grabbed a frozen burrito and heated them in the station’s microwave. We nodded to each other and said, “Happy Thanksgiving.” In this case it was just good to be alive. As we left Jamestown and headed East we realized how blessed we were, the roadside was littered with overturned trucks and cars. Many people have similar Thanksgiving stories; many probably have stories of Thanksgivings in faraway places such Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or a number of other places that have left indelible memories. I have been blessed for the past fourteen years to spend every Thanksgiving with my family, sometimes it was just me and my wife but we were family. For the past six years it has been at the very least the four of us and there has also been a lot of extended family and friends at times as well.
I am looking forward to Thanksgiving this year because the four of us are going over to join my mom and my nephew and niece for Thanksgiving north of San Diego in San Marcos. As the years go on and I attend more and more funerals of family and friends I realize how important and precious times like these are. The people you value the most aren’t always going to be there. You never know when you are spending your last Thanksgiving with them. We have a tradition at Family of Christ here in Phoenix. Right after the sermon we ask people to stand up and tell everyone what they are thankful for. If you understand anything about Lutherans you know that is pushing the envelope. We Lutherans don’t usually talk about our feelings, especially in front of groups of people. Therefore I am always amazed at the number of people who do stand up and express, sometimes very emotionally, what they are thankful for. Many times what is expressed is that they are thankful for their families and for each other. I know that is what I am thankful for. I am thankful for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the family he has given me both inside and outside the church. In fact I am thankful for so many things I have that I can’t begin to list them.
As I said before Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday, at the same time thankfulness is a Christian virtue. We have so much to be thankful for. As Christians we have been adopted by Christ into his family. We have been saved from death and damnation through our faith in Jesus. If there was ever anything to be thankful that would be it. In addition to that he has given us so much more, namely our families and our friends that we share our lives with. He has also given us homes and jobs and health and food you name it. Too often we take those things for granted and we only think about them when they are gone. The holiday of Thanksgiving is a way of guarding against that. So this Thanksgiving wherever you are, gathered around the family dinner table with those you love, at a friend’s house, at a roadside gas station in the middle of nowhere, take the time to think about what you are thankful for, and also take the time to thank God for them, and then thank the people around you for being who they are in your life. Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday, but maybe it should be.

Pastor Fred

I Have Found The Sinner and He is Me!

One of my biggest pet peeves in life are people that go through the drive thru lane at a fast food restaurant or someplace like Starbucks and then order for a bunch of people. They take forever to order and then when they get to the window it seems like they are never going to move. You know the scene, the person inside hands them a cup of coffee, and you think okay, but they don’t move, then the person inside hands them another cup of coffee and a bag holding some pumpkin bread or something. Still the car doesn’t move. Slowly another cup of something is handed to them, then the person inside leans their head out the window and you know they are listening to some complaint, and sure enough there goes a cup of coffee back to the server and the car doesn’t move. Several more minutes go by and then another cup of something passes through the window to the person in the car, obviously the replacement for the wrong drink they had received before. The worst part is that you know it was probably the person in the car who messed up the order in the first place, Aunt May wanted caramel in that drink and they forgot to mention that. So now you think the car is going to move but no the server sticks her head out the window again and the person inside the car hands them a wad of cash. Don’t they know everyone uses credit cards these days! Now the server is going to have to count them and invariable will count them wrong and there will be more conversation between the car and the window. This is one of my biggest pet peeves as everyone in my family knows all too well.
When this is going on I am saying things like, “Oh for crying out loud people, if you are ordering for more than two go inside, that’s what inside is for. Those of us out here in cars are in our cars for a reason, we are in a hurry, you’re in a car, you should know that, but NO, you’re too important to go inside, who cares if the rest of us have to wait, we really don’t matter after all do we?” “I mean how rude and inconsiderate can you get, I bet his guy also brings a full cart to the 15 or less items line at the grocery store”, another pet peeve of mine. My wife is always saying, “Please stop, it’s not going to speed anything up, we just have to wait.” My response, “You’re right we have to wait because that guy decided to order for the whole office in his car!” My kids by this time are laying back in their seats staring out the window, hoping no one hears my ranting. Patience is not a virtue of mine when it comes to waiting behind people who order for half the community in the drive thru. Now I don’t go through the drive thru at Starbucks every day, not even most days, but it seems that when I do, I always get behind one of these horrible sinful people who should know better.
Saturday Charlie had baseball practice early in the morning. After practice I usually like to take him someplace for a treat, and that morning I decided that I would get the whole family a treat, so after practice Charlie and I drove to Starbucks. I asked Charlie what he wanted. He said that wanted some of those pink birthday donuts that Starbucks serves and that he also wanted a drink. I though well if I get that for him, I also have to get that for Jasmine as well, and then I also need to get something like for Darla and come to think of it that sounds pretty good for me too. As we were pulling up to Starbucks Charlie said he wanted to go inside, I said, “No, not this morning, mommy and Jasmine are waiting and we have a lot to get done today we will just go through the drive thru.” So when I got to box where you order I put in my order of a Venti Americano with cream, a Grande strawberries and cream and two Grande hot chocolates, plus I also wanted six of the birthday donuts and a brownie. The voice in the box said, “I don’t know if we have six birthday donuts, let me check”, so I sat there in line while she checked. She came back and said, “No I only have three of those.” Oh I said, “Well how about those pink birthday pops, how many of them do you have?” She said, “Wait a minute let me check”, so I waited there while she checked. She came back and informed me she had plenty of those and so I said “Give me three birthday donuts and also three of the birthday pops and drop the brownie.” “You don’t want the brownie sir”; “No” I said “I don’t want the brownie.” “Okay” she said and then proceeded to run through my order with me. After she did, I said “No I don’t want cream in that Americano, I want whole milk.” “Oh I thought you said cream?” “No whole milk”, actually I had said cream because that is the way that I order coffee at Dunkin Donuts. So finally we were done. A few minutes later I found myself at the window. The server opened the window and started to hand me a drink, but I stopped her, and asked if she could please put all the drinks in a cup holder, so she took the drink back and closed the window. The window opened again and she handed me the tray of drinks which I put on the seat beside me and before I did anything else I took the Americano out and tasted it to make sure it was whole milk and not cream. I turned back around and she was handing me the donuts and pops. I took them and made sure I looked in the package to see if they were all there. Then I reached for my Starbucks gift card, which I had forgot to put in my wallet so I had to start digging through my pockets. Finally I found it and handed it to her. The window closed and then opened back up again and she informed me that I still owed a little over seven dollars. Not wanting to use my credit card I started rummaging for dollar bills in my pockets again. I finally end up with a wad of cash in my hand and I figured there was at least seven dollars in there and so I just handed it to her. She started to straighten it out and count it and then window closed again. Finally she opened the window and said I need another dollar. I didn’t have another dollar so I asked for my money back and handed her my credit card. As I did I looked in the rearview mirror and it hit me. Opps!