Notes from my Knapsack 11-25-21

Notes from my Knapsack 11-25-21
Jeff Gill

Thankful for losses, large and small
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Being thankful is one of the usual duties of the season, and certainly an expectation for columnists. Most of us find at one point or another as November winds its way towards December thinking about what we are thankful for.

You can make quite a list, some years, of gifts and events and occasions, of people and relationships, of all that has made us thankful in the last year, or at least as much of it as we can recall from the vantage point of the eleventh month.

My thoughts are going in a somewhat different direction, not that I don't have a number of wonderful reasons to be freshly thankful. But after the last few years I've had work to do heading into Thanksgiving Day on being thankful for . . . well, let's put it this way: for things I generally didn't start out being thankful for.

I'm still slowly adjusting to not being a parish minister, a settled preacher in a church where I go to the same pulpit each Sunday and preach to a largely similar congregation week after week. That is the life I had been used to for decades before, and like most people, I liked what I was used to.

Yet there are blessings to having the freedom, which I had to push myself to claim, of being able to care for family members in the middle of the complications of COVID. There are pleasures of meeting new faces, masked or otherwise, and preaching to a completely different group than you did the last time you got up to share good news as a preacher. It stretches different preaching muscles to craft a message that way, and I've learned some things about myself, about churches, about faith.

And as I've written about before, the aftermath of my father's passing and the closing down of the family house in Indiana has brought me home taking a different eye to my own possessions, some of them with strong sentimental attachments. Aside from the truism of "you can't take it with you," you can't even get much of it into a retirement community, and most of it my son is not going to want to inherit. I'm thankful I've been coming to a new relationship to my stuff, to memorabilia, to what I (think I) can't do without.

With this year's new version of some of the same struggles we had last year, not to get into too many personal details, it's also been a time to confront some limits. In myself, in others, and as we (in our family, anyhow) start to assess what we can and can't do it's a healthy time to figure out what is possible, even if it's not exactly what we wanted to do. Clarity is a gift, one with sharp edges but a useful reflection.

So I find myself thankful, in a way, for losses, for paring down, cutting back, getting focus even if on a smaller field of view. Clarity is indeed a gift, and I want to be thankful for it.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thankful for a whole lot of people but that's a different column. Tell him about how you've been thankful for unexpected things at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.