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“Blessed”
Rev. David K.
Groth
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Back
in St. Louis, one of my neighbors was by the name of Ed. Ed was a bus driver for the city of St. Louis. It
seemed he was always outside tinkering on something. More often than not, the first person I’d
encounter in the morning when getting the newspaper was Ed. The exchange
would always go like this: “Good
morning, Ed. How you doing?” Without fail or deviation, Ed would smile
broadly (exposing his gold tooth of which he was proud), and answer, “I’m
blessed.” It could be five degrees or more likely 95
degrees and humid. Ed could have
been up to his ankles in snow or up to his knees in leaves. He could be tinkering with something under
his car or tuck-pointing his chimney.
It didn’t matter. The litany
was always the same. “How you doing,
Ed?” “I’m blessed.”
Ed
understands something important about Christian theology. He understands God has given us
everything. We don’t earn life and
salvation and we don’t deserve them either. They come to us as gifts. And so the fundamental Christian response
to God is gratitude. Expressing
gratitude is also one of the Christian’s greatest joys. “How good it is to sing praises to our
God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him! Sing to the Lord with
thanksgiving!” (Ps. 147:1,7)
Sometimes I think we are so busy,
running so fast, overbooked, over-committed, working as hard as we possibly
can, that we not only miss noticing the blessings in our lives, but we also
fail to invest ourselves in expressing gratitude to God for them. We miss the deep pleasure of giving
thanks. That is, if I were to wake
up next week an atheist, I think what I would miss most is this deep
pleasure of giving thanks. Yet that
is what we voluntarily bring on ourselves when we get it into our heads
that what we have we’ve earned, and that other people really ought to be thanking
us.
I’m glad Thanksgiving comes when
it does in the calendar, usually a few days before Advent. It always feels like the official opening
of Christmas. One of our family
traditions has been: no Christmas
music before Thanksgiving Day, but on Thanksgiving Day – after dinner and
the football games – then it’s fair game to roll out the Christmas music
for its first hearing. What better
day than Thanksgiving Day to be reminded of simple and pure grace, that child
born in Bethlehem whom we can only humbly receive as a gift . . . that gift
of the Savior for whom we can only say “Thank you, Lord.”
It was a lesson that Ed reminded
me of just about every morning:
“How you doing Ed?”
“I’m blessed.”
It’s true – about him and about me and
about us all, and to know it and say it is a good way to start your day and
to live it.
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