wakeup call

This morning a verse that I’ll carry all day, like a go bag or, a staff that bears my weight and steadies my feet:

Continue steadfastly in prayer, staying awake in it with thanksgiving.

I sat on my parents’ back porch for a while just receiving provisions, grace, from God, sipping coffee while the day began all new, as the salty breezes drifted off the ocean, drawing music from the windchimes.

Every year about this time, I feel a wakeup call back to thankfulness, as time comes and the trees are touched with reds and oranges and yellows, like holy flames, as we unpack sheltering clothes and pull out blankets for our feet, wrapping our hands around mugs of steamy coffee and cinnamon tea.  With warm, nutty pumpkin spices and the return of cozy days, I annually welcome the invitation, as a former leper—healed, going home in community with others who’ve been made whole, to turn back to worship.

Continue steadfastly in prayer, staying awake in it with thanksgiving.

Here, something remarkable:  Paul penned those words, an exhortation to Colossian Christians, while imprisoned, and he used, as he often did, an unceasing tense, conveyed not to an individual but to an entire community.  It’s easy for me to think of giving thanks as an individual activity, a thing I go back to do alone, like the one out of ten, maybe a list I keep in my journal or part of a personal prayer, but I remember that when the one returned, Jesus asked, Were there not ten of you?  Where are the other nine?  And maybe this wasn’t chiefly an indictment of the others, but an articulation of His greater desire for a thankfulness that we share, not just annually around our Thanksgiving table or during October and November on social media, though these good activities keep us significantly watchful too, but always together in prayer, as we go about witnessing His restoration in each other.

Long after I close my journal on these thoughts and wander inside with my empty coffee mug, while I cut fruit for breakfast and we set the long table on the porch, I feel a deep yes settling, a real desire to cultivate not just my own renewed thankfulness but a grateful community.  The food nearly ready, I know part of the filling feast, and this a foreshadowing of the great party when we all return home, will be our shared thanks, offered open palmed in lifted hands to our magnificent God.  One day, all the healed ones will stand before Christ, offering Him our thanks together.

As we gather at the table now, limping at various speeds, still pajama-clad and rumpled with sleep, the question sits on the tip of my tongue:  What are you thankful for today?

My parents struggle just to move these days, and as time comes, they seem to wear sleep about their eyes, in their skin and the curve of their bones, like they’re covered in some sort of physical wintering.  Yet while outwardly [they] are wasting away, yet inwardly [they] are being renewed day by day—again Paul with the unceasing tenses, and so with time the Spirit flourishes, His work building, His compassion and love crowning, always birthing more fruit.  There is always much for which to be thankful, and while yet physically we fall toward sleep, it is possible to be wide awake together.

Another truth, with which the Spirit wraps me up against the chill and feeds me full, this morning: Eucharisteo, or thanksgiving, keeps us awake in prayer.  This is good news for me, because I tend to fall asleep in continuity, to be lulled into complacency by weariness and ordinary days, by, as Eugene Petersen described it, the long obedience in the same direction.  As a result, I feel stunned and a trifle overwhelmed by the urgent, repetitive, imperative encouragement of scripture to stay awake, being watchful and thankful, especially when I can feel Winter coming in my bones.  But it is thanksgiving that will keep me awake, the determination to keep returning, in community with others, to bring thanksgiving to the Lord, this being not merely a practice for happier times, but the unity of our voices amidst the honesty of struggling, in response to the potential for division.  Thanksgiving, then, is a kind of vigil-keeping, with the kind of priority we extend to talking to each other on long drives through the darkness, mutually stimulating alertness in one another.  We might as well be always pressing through just such a trip, for all the encroachment of night and the development of our perseverance.  We wonder how to keep on keeping on, how to stay safe and on the road, moving toward home, and we haven’t been left with our wondering.

Be steadfast in prayer, staying awake in it with thanksgiving.

I am prone to leave, as I said, so part of my gratitude as I make my return yet again, another prodigal journey after countless others, depending on His unending compassion and always open invitation, is that He remains, never giving up on me.  This I know, after so many years being apprenticed to Him:  The formation of my heart unto unceasing, thank-fullness will not be achieved, however diligent I may or may not be, by any resolution or self-discipline of my own.  It will not be achieved by me at all, but only by His healing power, as I ask again and again in faith, making my return.  If you are willing, you can make me clean.  So, I bring that too, my preoccupied, numbing heart, like a broken thing held toward Him, balanced on my open hands, and this is how He’s rewritten the invitation this year, telling me to go and give thanks, inviting others to come with me.

So, what are you thankful for today?

I lay it out on the table like a red cord dangling, a lifeline drawing us back from the lurk of worry, the growl of angst, the chattering volume of voices decrying everything.  It’s good to be alert to our rescue, especially as the battle rages around us.

“I’m thankful that Jesus came and died for me,” Mom says immediately, her eyes suddenly wide, putting down her fork because really is there any other food than this?  She presses a hand flat over her heart as she speaks.

“…that He loved us so much that He would do that,” Dad says, taking up, as usual, where Mom leaves off, his voice wavering with feeling.

After these, the first fruits, our words of thanksgiving pour out like rushing water, like living water undammed, our thanksgiving for what God has done, for His restoration poured out in and through each other, dripping out from our eyes in grateful tears, love swelling among us with real joy.  As usual, I stand amazed, moved again by the abundance our good Father wants for us, how through His Spirit, He leads us, in ways we can’t even understand, to the kind of feasting that truly fills and fuels us.  Suddenly, in gratefulness together, we are not only awake to Him and speaking our praises as one, but we also feel stronger, built-up, more whole because of sharing Him.  This is not something we have to say, but rather something we experience with energizing alertness as we are brought into oneness around His table.

And as we finish our meal and move to clear the emptied plates, our forks sliding into stillness, I am thinking that perhaps this is where conversation full of grace begins, the words that can be spoken for the building up of all who listen, on a return to Christ for giving thanks, in a wakeup call kind of communing prayer about all that He has accomplished, all the good He has given us.