Recently I had the rare opportunity to meet a dear friend for coffee. As we reconnected we had a great time talking about a number of subjects. She updated me on her grand kids; I told her all about my two kiddos and their adventures. She about her mother coming to visit for Thanksgiving; me about a scrap-booking retreat I just attended. As the subject wondered around a clear theme began to emerge; documenting our heritage; the stories of our lives both physical and spiritual.
I’ve been reflecting on this. It strikes a chord with me. As a child, one of my dad’s words of wisdom was how important is to have a “record of God’s faithfulness.” You know it’s one of those things my parents “harped” on when I was a kid and now as an adult I look back and see the character it developed in me. Dad would write his prayer requests in his little black Day-Timer and then go back and write the answers when they came. This became a very real record of God’s faithfulness in the life of our family. I’ve used the concept in many different forms with my own children. Recently we revived an old tradition. Each Friday we all get a couple of strips of paper with our dinner. As the meal is done we have the opportunity to write down something we are grateful for. Those papers are then deposited into our “thank you box” which we will open on Thanksgiving and recall God’s faithfulness in our lives this year.
At the coffee shop my friend was sharing with me about “Operation Thanksgiving - Grandma’s Stories”. They have devised a plan to get Grandma to tell her stories; the stories nobody knows and that would be lost if grandma didn’t have the chance to tell them. One of the grandkids has a school assignment about family heritage over the holidays and so they plan to use this project as a natural conversation starter to encourage Grandma to start story telling.
This is why I scrapbook. As I record our day to day lives, I’m writing about the day God protected us from a terrible accident or the way he blessed us with a trip to Disney through John’s work at FedEx. I am recording for my children the acts of our good and faithful God in their day to day lives.
In Joshua 4:4--7 God instructs Joshua to create a memorial of God’s deliverance:
So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
When my kids were little we used to tell this story from Joshua and build our own memorial. We used their Mega Blocks, you know the oversized lego type building blocks, to build our memorial. Each of us would take a block and as we placed it on our tower we would say something we were thankful for.
“Do you know why our country celebrated the first Thanksgiving? Because GOD had protected them and provided for them. Thanksgiving is a response to God’s miraculous provision in our lives!” Ps. Robert Morris – Gateway Church.
As you make pies, bake cookies, put up your tree and prepare the turkey, I encourage you to also plan ways to create a record of God’s faithfulness in your life. Then celebrate, rejoice in God’s faithfulness. Isn’t that what Thanksgiving should be, a genuine response to God’s faithfulness in your life.
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