I was raised saying grace before every family meal, and just about every meal was a family meal. “Bless us Oh Lord and these thy gifts,” my father would intone, “which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ Our Lord Amen.” He said it in one breath with exactly the same lack of inflection every time.
Maybe that’s why I was an adult with six children before I actually understood what it is to give thanks, to be thankful. Our table grace was not a prayer of thanks, but a prayer merely acknowledging the source of what we had, and then asking for more. “Bless us, oh Lord,” so we would continue to have more than enough food to eat? “Bless us, oh Lord,” so we would always have heat in the winter and fans in the summer and gasoline in the tank of a car that ran? “Hey, God, You did great. Keep it coming.”
I didn’t grow up in an affluent family. All of us children had what we needed and enough of what we wanted to be happy. Not only did we always have what we needed, we never feared it wouldn’t always be that way. We had no worries that at some point our parents would be unable to provide for us. My adult life was the same. Yes, there was the financial stress young families face, but we were always confident.
And then we got knocked soundly on our backsides, without meaningful employment, without income, and without financial reserves. We were fearful. We had responsibilities far outweighing our ability to meet them.
I learned then that the system of weights and measures I had always used to tally up my blessings was inadequate. The autumn that I was most anxious about the coming winter I learned the value of the unwavering support of family and loyal friends.
That Thanksgiving, I used the quiet of the early morning to write a list of things for which I was thankful. I thought it would be a short list. I quit writing when I got to 20. Abundant blessings flashed at me through the dense fog of anger, frustration and fear. I held onto the warmth of those blessings until spring came again.
I haven’t forgotten the lesson. There are blessings more important than those that are apparent in a checkbook or savings balance. I’ve been enormously blessed in many, many ways.
We still say the traditional table grace in our family, and that’s what we’ll say before Thanksgiving dinner. But if I have my way, we’ll add on “Rubba-dub-dub, thank God for the grub….and the friends, and the strength, and the energy, and the guidance, and the help, and each other, and all the blessings we don’t even realize we’ve received. Yay God!”
