A Second Look at Thanksgiving Thieves

Not to beat a dead horse, but it has happened again.  Thanksgiving thieves have struck. 

Only, this time it wasn’t us.  A young couple, son and daughter-in-law of friends at church, came home yesterday from work to find their place had been robbed and many things taken.  The young wife is seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child.

They will recover, they will get past this, they will have a new baby in a couple of months, and life will move on. 

But, now, this robbery becomes part of their story.  For them, what will be the title of this chapter?

I can’t say what design this dark thread will weave in this pair’s life.  But it has made me ponder our own Thanksgiving thieves–again–and try–again–to sort out the depth that dark thread lends to our life picture. 

It is ironic that the major thefts of our family’s possessions both occurred at Thanksgiving time.  It was almost as if we were being challenged:  “Are you REALLY thankful?  How thankful ARE you?  Can you be thankful when all is not roses and sunshine?”  I can’t honestly say the first words out of my lips in either case were “Thank you, Lord!”  But, with the perspective of time (not necessarily weeks or months–thankfully, only hours), there is the ability to be “thankful in spite of.” 

However, there is still the temptation for that gratitude to be relative in nature.  Thieves only took “stuff”, not personal items.  But what if they’d stolen that one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry that had belonged to my mother-in-law?  Or what if they had ransacked and destroyed photo albums or broken my “honeymoon lamp”?  What if, for some reason, insurance had not covered our losses and we had had to replace everything out of our own pockets?  What if, to cover up their tracks, they had set our house on fire and every shred of our external lives had been reduced to ashes?  What if the “in spite of”, the “..but…” from which we can derive a degree of comfort just wasn’t big enough to do the job this time?

If we stop at the “…but…”, we are still not in all that great a place when loss strikes.  We must go on to one better:  “…but God…” During this Thanksgiving week, we are standing by in prayer while a work colleague and his dear family tenderly care for a mother who is, with every breath, closer to losing her earthly battle with cancer.  It seems that every Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday for the past several years has found us making at least one funeral home visit.  Tragedies don’t check the calendar before striking.  So, in the midst of celebrations and rejoicings at holidays, we are struck with the cold, hard realities of the thefts of love and life.  They would be unbearable except for that:  “…but God…”

We are weak, but He is strong.  We lose stuff, but He is enough.  Loved ones leave us, but He has promised never to leave us or forsake us.  The “thieves” can never take enough away from us to diminish God or His goodness in our lives.  Indeed, it is so often at that very space where we have lost most largely that God comes with an even larger measure of His unbounded love and compassion and provision for our every need.

If we could turn back the clocks and be the deciders of what happens to us, would we program in the robberies and the losses?  Not likely, given our human tendency for pain avoidance.  But, if these must come, we are abundantly blessed to know we are not alone and our aid in those moments is from the Hands of one who experienced total loss that we might know total gain.