Thanksgiving - God With Us

 

Matthew 28:20

I am with you always, even to the end of the age

Since our corporate commercial kingpins have decreed open season on shopping Thanksgiving Day (who is hunting who?), like deer season on Monday here in Pa, it made sense to mix Thanksgiving and Christmas. Giving thanks for God with us, Jesus. God with us is typical a Christmas theme, Babe in the Manger type of deal. As Letterman noted, with today being Black Thursday, Christmas is Saturday.

Most of the things we give God thanks for are passing. The Cornucopia is stuffed like a turkey with items of the world. Christ is in His good gifts, but is greater than the gifts. For He is the giver of all good things. When I contemplate and reflect on my life before and after Christ--for we all have B.C. and A.D. in our souls--where the timeless came into time--eternity incarnated, it is not a study on a life of difficulty vs. ease. In fact, in many ways life is harder as a Christian. But it is good hard.  

I am coming out of a pretty depressing last seven years where the dark providence of God decreed an advanced level of adversity. I don't see God as cruel and/or capricious, but neither do I view Him as a Deity who is inclined to make life smooth sailing. I have been in the drink, holding onto floating wreckage, trying to keep my head of water. I have swallowed my share of waves. It made me wonder what God was up to. I prayed for wisdom, as James instructs, and God answered back with more waves. Some major swells, some piddling. I held on. Not to say that I am innocent of the wreckage.

The Christian faith, with the Cross at its center, hardly deceives potential converts. It lays out suffering in the foreground. Yet, the shadow of the Cross shows the light from above, where there is no variation or shifting shadow. God may in the clouds but He is also above them. A return briefly to last week's rainbow reflection. God's plan ends with triumph over tragedy. In fact, it is really the only plan that does. Everything else is an eternal downhill despite temporary ascension.  

Katy Perry asks a serious profound question in her song Who Am I Living For?

I can feel this light that's inside of me
Growing fast into a bolt of lightning
I know one spark will shock the world, yeah yeah

So I pray for a favour like Esther
I need your strength to handle the pressure
I know there will be sacrifice
But that's the price

It's never easy to be chosen, never easy to be called
Standing on the frontline when the bombs start to fall
I can see the heavens but I still hear the flames
Calling out my name

I can see the writing on the wall
I can't ignore this war
At the eh-end of it all
Who am I living for?

I can see the writing on the wall
I can't ignore this war
At the eh-end of it all
Who am I living for?

I have to think that the story of Katy Perry singing out her salvation with fear and trembling is still being written. She may just be mouthing words with no meaning but there appears to be a lot going on under the surface. Let us pray for her that Christ would come to her and that she would lay it all at His pierced feet.

Life, this hard life, will break us all until we give it to Him who was broken for us. It is His already, we are just returning our lives to Him, the rightful owner.

   

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