Hello friends,
It’s such a cliche, but I can’t believe how quickly the year is winding down. Right now we’re busy filling our calendars with Christmas and year-end events, making sure we get time for those most important commitments before the time is all gone.
What are the non-negotiables on your calendar during the holidays? This year we’re adding a read-aloud of A Christmas Carol, which—provided it goes well—I hope to make an annual event.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Thankful to be Dust
Next Thursday we will gather around a table, and my husband will read aloud Psalm 103, as he does each year.
“…forget not all his benefits,” says verse two, and so we will make an effort to remember. We will list some benefits from this life…from this year…from these days. We will “string the pearls of his favor,” as Henry Ward Beecher said.
As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. (13-14)
There are various degrees to which we feel “dusty” in life; some years we feel beaten up and dragged along…“like butter scraped over too much bread.1” Other years there’s a sense of hopefulness and vitality. Both are right and good in their season. But the Lord remembers that we are dust, even when we forget it ourselves.
Thanksgiving has always been near the top of my list of holidays since the days gathered around my grandmother’s table in upstate New York. We would enjoy the midday feast with my father’s family, including my “big cousins,” who were ten-plus years my senior. One year the youngest son arrived on a motorcycle, amazing us all. My grandmother had a steady flow of widowed friends who would sit at one end of the table, eating daintily and giggling at us little ones.
Later in the day, we’d head to the dairy farm where my mother was raised, for Thanksgiving dinner number two. This one took place after the evening milking was concluded. We squeezed into the farmhouse kitchen around a table with two turkeys: one domestic and one wild. Occasionally the sound of buckshot hitting a plate would be heard—the wild turkey’s extra gift to the eater. My aunt would try to get me to eat Brussels sprouts (boiled—why?!) It was loud, crowded, and too hot in the way that all family celebrations are.
Next week we will be crowded around a table here in my home—family plus some special extras. It will be loud, crowded, and too hot. There will be children and adults; single and married; older and younger. I wager that underneath the veneer, there will be a mix of feelings: discouraged, hopeful, or otherwise.
The Lord remembers.
This year I wish you a Thanksgiving of remembering your limitations; of understanding your Source; of knowing the place in which you’ve been set, despite the clamoring within you to be elsewhere. May you enjoy drippy candles, wobbly potatoes, warm pie, and a contented seat at a well-loved table. May the Lord give you peace, contentment, and joy where you are and when you are.
For the Anglophiles
Here’s a nice piece on the last days of CS Lewis. “Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking.”
Reads & Listens of the Week
The Athletic did a beautiful profile of quarterback Jim Kelly last week. “Kelly is like that old tree that has lost branches and bark but somehow has grown more robust.”
Louisa May Alcott used pen names. A researcher thinks he found another. Tiny shoutout to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA—a nice place to tour if you ever happen to be in central Massachusetts.
gave us a good list of Eleven Great “Family” Films: “…because good art matters and because beauty, goodness, and truth are indeed objective, I’d rather watch a film that’s a great work of art but with morals that don’t entirely line up with ours over a banal, ridiculous ‘family film’ full of trite nonsense.” (But also: Tsh and I get it—we all had times when Dora the Explorer was the most popular show in our home.)Lastly, here’s a funny new book from my friend, SD Smith:
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. - GK Chesterton
Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring