Can I just say how much I love my church ? We get the church newsletter and I wanted to share the feature related to being thankful to prevent bitterness – very appropriate with turkey day just around the corner…
Dear Saints of newhope,
Back during the dark days of 1929, a group of ministers in the Northeast, all graduates of the Boston School of Theology, gathered to discuss how they should conduct their Thanksgiving Sunday services. Things were about as bad as they could get, with no sign of relief. The bread lines were depressingly long, the stock market had plummeted, and the term Great Depression seemed an apt description for the mood of the country. The pastors thought they should only lightly touch upon the subject of Thanksgiving in deference to the human misery all about them. After all, what was there to be thankful for during times such as these?
However, it was Dr. William L. Stiger, pastor of a large congregation in the city that rallied the group. This was not the time, he suggested, to give mere passing mention to Thanksgiving, just the opposite. This was the time for the nation to get matters in perspective and thank God for blessings always present, but perhaps suppressed due to intense hardship.
I suggest to you that these ministers struck upon something incredibly significant. The most intense moments of thankfulness are not found in times of plenty, but when difficulties abound. Think of the Pilgrims that first Thanksgiving. Half their number dead, men without a country, but still there was thanksgiving to God! Their gratitude was not for something, but in someone! It was that same sense of gratitude that lead Abraham Lincoln to formally establish the first Thanksgiving Day in the midst of national civil war, when the butcher’s list of casualties seemed to have no end and the very nation struggled for survival.
Perhaps in your own life, right now, there is intense hardship. You are experiencing your own personal Great Depression. Why should you be thankful this day? May I suggest one big reason?
We must learn to be thankful or we will become bitter! Even the mention of the word conjures up a particular look upon the face of a bitter person. This is a person who is constantly unsatisfied with their life. Nothing makes them happy and they purposely make life miserable not only for themselves, but also for those who have the misfortune of being around them. The bitter person becomes absorbed with the question of “why me?” He/she feels that they have been short-changed. There is nothing sadder, in my opinion, than a terminally bitter person. Thanksgiving is the very best practice to prevent bitterness.
Dr. Jim Moore, is a Christian author and pastor of a large and effective church in Houston, Texas. Several years ago he wrote a little book that perhaps some of you have seen entitled, “You Can Get Bitter or You Can Get Better.” He told the story of a twenty-six-year-old woman in his congregation, whose husband died in a horrible accident. The man’s tractor brushed up against a hot electric wire and killed him instantly. Now, here she was, with three children, insufficient money, and hopes dashed.
As the local newspapers and television networks covered this awful story, they quoted the widow as saying, “I don’t know what I am going to do without him,” she sobbed. “But I do know what my choices are. I can get bitter or I can get better. I am turning to God and the church so that I can get better.”
She underscored a universal truth. When trouble slams us, we do have choices. Thanksgiving rolls around every year to encourage us to choose Thanksgiving! It is the perfect biblical prescription to avoid terminal bitterness.
And if the sound weren’t bad enough, it smelled so foul that even the dogs were uncomfortable and I seriously thought Brook was going to start dry-heaving.
