Blessing Upon Blessing - Thanksgiving 2010

Collard greens, pecan pies, cornbread cooked in a black skillet. Kids playing football in the yard, women laughing and cooking in the kitchen, men huddled around a black and white TV. When I think about Thanksgiving's spent growing up in Macon that's what I remember. Food, fun, laughter - it was a blessed childhood.

To be a part of that family came with a history of struggles. We met in my Aunt Geneva's house most years, on the fringe of the mill village where most everyone worked or had worked. But you'd never know it on Thanksgiving.

I've never known a more thankful group of people.

They didn't have much - but they shared it.

And they loved each other deeply, from the heart.

I am so thankful to have been able to experience that. And to know them.

Then I got married to the most wonderful woman I have ever known. A whole other world opened to me. Another family filled with love. Our years seeing all our kids come into the world and sharing the joys of life and sharing the sorrows together added another level of joy. To say that my wife's parents were just "in-laws" is to trivialize the sacred. They were gifts from God, just as their daughter is a gift from God. Through those relationships I was led to faith in God, became a husband and a father. Blessings followed blessings.

Eleven years ago we left all of that to follow God's call to a small church in a place we'd never heard of. We left a lot behind even though we were able to keep in touch by phone, through email, and infrequent visits. But as the years rolled on, we realized we gained another family. We've been through a lot together - great joys and deep sorrows. Yet we have seen God at work in incredible ways. We've cried and laughed together. They are family too.

Heaven's Thanksgiving table is going to be amazing when all these people get together.

And I am so thankful to God for everything He has given.

In Macon GA

Well, we arrived in Macon in the wee hours of the morning and crashed at Bunny's parent's house. Nothing like an iron double bed frame designed for people 100 years ago to provide a satisfying rest for two people accustomed to a California King sized bed.

Henley was great on the trip up, which was mostly uneventful except for observing a fight that broke out at a gas station we had stopped at in Albany, which turned out not to have any regular gasoline anyway. The stretch of roads between Valparaiso and here travels through a very rural area for the most part. It was Friday evening, and there was very little activity at all, even in the little towns we pass through.

Bunny and Sean are headed over this morning to visit Bunny's mom (Dot), and I am in high hopes I will have Nu-Way's for lunch. The picture is of the window of the Mecca for Nu-Way's on Cotton Avenue. I'll probably get some from the Zebulon Road location, but's that's okay too.

The Buzzard's Roost

26-31 Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God." 1 Cor 1 - The Message

Back in the day, I used to work at a place on the wrong side of the tracks in Macon, GA. How do you know you're on the wrong side of the tracks? Wait until one day when the train is in between you and lunch - then you'll get it.

Anyway, the area was light industrial, with added benefits like the city landfill and dog pound. On the way there, right before you'd pass under the railroad overpass, almost any day, you'd see a group of men waiting there, hoping to be hired as day laborers. Week in, week out, day in, day out they would be there. In the harsh summer, they'd be trying to find some shade, and in winter they'd be huddled around a fire in a 55 gallon trash drum. But they'd be there.

I never gave them much thought outside those extremes of temperature. Never wondered how they got there, or if they had families. Never really looked hard in their direction. Just remember someone telling me that you could stop by and says something like "I got 20 bucks I'll pay for some work today" and guys would climb in the back of your truck. I guess I suspected most were alcoholics or something. Back then it was hard for me to grasp what unemployment meant.

Then God allowed me to experience that, and also to get to know some folks like those as I worked in a ministry center that helped people in need with food, clothing, and some limited job placements.

So I'm reading Matthew's gospel today, getting ready for Sunday. We're focusing on the "red letter passages" of Jesus' words for now. But I always make sure we get the context - the setting might be in black type, but you need it too.

Jesus goes down to the lakeside - to what today would be the docks. It was an area back then much like the "Buzzard's Roost" was in Macon. Fishermen might need an extra hand or two some days, so men would congregate there hoping for a day's labor.

That is the absolute last place I would have gone to pick the men who would carry out the most important mission ever given to mankind.

I cannot separate that scene from the one in my memory. I think back at all the times I saw those men there, and there's just no way I would have looked to them for help in doing anything important.

No way.

None.

God, forgive me.

Pride's a funny thing. You can convince yourself that you are a good person, an ordinary guy. You can claim you'd never look down on anybody. Even cite your humble roots. I know I've written about being born in a mill village.

But just as soon as God's grace, His completely unmerited grace gives you what you need to "move up" in the eyes of society...

read this very carefully...

You also move away.

Away from your neighbor. Away from looking at people as Jesus did. Away from anything remotely resembling the good news. It's sin.

Man I hate it when the preacher becomes the preached to.

So I thought I'd share. :)

Grace!

David
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