This year marked my first thanksgiving away from home. And pretty far away from home at that. It was a much different thanksgiving. Instead of all seven members of my family being spread out in our spacious kitchen cooking so many different thanksgiving favorites there was a closet sized kitchen and all 11 of us attempting to cook modified thanksgiving favorites. We used the ingredients that we could find and substituted LOTS of ingredients, all of us hoping that whatever dish we were making would turn out okay. We ended up having to create a bit of a schedule so that everyone could make their dish without stepping on top of each other or overcrowding our small refrigerator and even smaller oven.
We told the people who live in our small community “Happy Thanksgiving!” The best response? There’s an older woman who works at the guest house we stay at, we call her Auntie. Her response was, “yeah, yeah happy birthday!” Or from our dear friend and stitching teacher, “Happy your thanksgiving!”
We went swimming in the Arabian sea mid-afternoon and played football and volleyball on the beach. I attempted to show some of our male Indian contacts how to throw a football. It didn’t go so well. But we threw the ball around nonetheless. Much different from the boys in my family, who might as well come out of the womb knowing how to throw a football.
We then enjoyed our modified thanksgiving dinner with our family that we’ve formed here, both American and Indian.
It was miles away from a traditional Kicker family thanksgiving. There was no Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, no dogs getting under everyone’s feet while we try to cook, no one bickering over music selection, no one to drag out of bed to start cooking, no long sleeves, no going through the advertisements for the next day, no football to watch and missing the people who complete the puzzle of who I am.
But even though it was so different, it was still good. Because my God is so good. And it gave me an amazing opportunity about what thanksgiving really means. And that’s exactly what I taught the kids at tuition on Friday. I explained to puzzled faces why we celebrate thanksgiving in America. But more importantly, I told them that because we have Jesus, we can be thankful for the ways that’s he has blessed us everyday. Since this summer, I’ve started making lists of my gratitudes as a spiritual discipline. And it’s been such a great thing for my life with Jesus, especially since I’ve been in India. And it was so cool to be able to teach my precious kids about what being thankful means, and that we can be thankful in all circumstances. We then went around the room expressing what we were thankful for. The resounding response from the kids was they were thankful for us. For the way we teach them, put bandaids on all of their sores, hug them and play with them. Such a blessing to hear them say that! And we had one of the kids pray for snack – he prayed in Hindi, but we discovered after that he had said, “Jesus, teacher is bringing biscuits. This is very good. Thanks!” and then another kid took over for him. So great, and it makes me wonder all of the cute things we miss the kids saying because we can’t understand them.
We have a week of ministry left and then we’ll be doing quite a bit of traveling. Please keep our last week of ministry in your prayers and please pray for our traveling!
