A Thanksgiving Visit

SUN., NOV. 28, 1999, 7:13 AM
FARM, STUDY

You were up early on this cool, cloudy Sunday morn, seeing son Bob and his three young ones off on their trip home. You awoke before the alarm, and the breakfast and departure went about as planned. So that portion of the family who gathered, several times during this Thanksgiving weekend, is heading for home, and soon normality will return.

Family visits are important to you and Lenore, and this one was without Michael, your second son, who returned to realms of spirit during this year. So you realize that each holiday celebration in the future could be without one or more of you who were here this year. But family life is continuous, and this morning, later, you shall be present at the baptism of John Isaac, your youngest grandson, who joined the family just this year. And you heard the news that oldest granddaughter, Rivanna, will become a mother this next year, moving you and Lenore to great-grandparent-hood.

It is good to be thankful for life, but, realistically, you must also be thankful for death, an essential aspect of blessed life. It is likely that our mother-in-law, Mabel, will be the next one to pass on over from this planet to a more heavenly one, but you also realize that you also are a “candidate for next.”

As you are with this family, gathered together, you do prize this life you are privileged to lead. Yet you do heed My counsel, too, which tells you that the next “scene” of the life of your spirit will be quite one to anticipate. Thus, it is good to be fully aware of and enjoy life as you live it now, but, soon, it will be even better to anticipate life in the spirit, free from a body that has increasing defects and deficiencies.

You are thankful that all of your grandchildren are healthy and intellectually able as children and young adults. Count this as a blessing for you as a grandfather. Yet your experience as a parent tells you that fatal accidents can happen (as you envisioned in a waking portion of a recent night, featuring grandsons not yet home), and that weaknesses can worsen and a “passage-on” can be sooner than expected. Such is earth life, when you have lived as long as you have, and longer.

The notion, reaffirmed in Karen’s sermon last week, that you need to be thankful for what is Objectionable, is an important one. The “whole family” was not gathered here, but you still can be thankful for Kathleen and Zach, who “elected” not to come, and for Megan, one not as comfortable with the Family as with her friends and their life together. You are thankful that Matthew has “returned” to happy participation in family affairs such as this one. Again, this is another example of flux and flow in families. There is a theoretically “Whole family,” but some choose to be active, while others opt out, temporarily or for longer.

With this secular-semi-sacred holiday now past, it is the Advent season. The culminating “event” is the remembrance of My birth, as Jesus, the commencement of a human family for Mary and Joseph. I didn’t lead a long earth life, and the Scriptures aren’t clear who, or how many, were My actual blood relatives. As an adult, and in My Mission, My disciples were My true Family, and though there were twelve specifically named, there were others, including some women, who were “My Family.”

In your professional career you have had “sub-families,” that were “active” for a time and then faded. You have been part of several “church families,” with some pains, as well as pleasures. And such it will continue to be, in a modern, mobile society, and as you age. You are not part of the actual church family into which John Isaac will be baptized today, though he shall “officially” join you in the greater Christian family.