Relaxing Thanksgiving

Have you ever been in charge of hosting a Thanksgiving dinner? Would you call it relaxing? While that isn't my usual adjective to describe the responsibility, it truly reflected Thanksgiving this year.

It all started when I began asking guests to join us for the special day. It got to be very funny. While a few people accepted our invitation, I invited 20 people who declined since they had other plans. The thought that came to my mind was,"God must not want me to work too hard for the meal."

I carefully ordered a frozen turkey ahead of time since they are not readily available here in Japan. Then a whole cooked turkey became available so that I didn't even have to bake the one I bought. Again I thought, "God must not want me to work too hard this Thanksgiving."

Thanksgiving morning it all became clear. Our neighbor Jennifer is a young teacher at Christian Academy and quite new to Japan. Thursday morning before I began dinner preparations, I received a phonecall saying Jen injured her foot. Since I speak Japanese and have a car, I took her to the hospital where we learned she has a bone fracture. We arrived home at 1:15 and my guests arrived at 2:00. Fortunately I had made the pies the night before. However, I had 45 minutes to pull together the rest of the dinner.

God has been speaking to me about "having a Mary heart in a Martha world." Somehow the impossibility of pulling off a whole feast together that quickly took away my fretfulness. We ended up with seven people at our table and they all made their helpful contributions so I really didn't have that much to do. The meal came together easily and we had great fellowship. My brother Tim even did the dishes.

Russ had thoughtfully picked out verses for us to read as we shared blessings of the past year. I thank God for a relaxing Thanksgiving.

Flossie