Giving Thanks (and the inverted word adventures! Okay...not really)

I might not have much time to post tomorrow, so I wanted to say something tonight, even though I feel exhausted.

This is, of course, the second straight night that I've felt exhausted and been incapable of sleeping. Last night was the second straight night of weird dreams...who knows what will happen tonight. I know I just can't sleep much right now. It's a rhythm I get into sometimes...where I get too much sleep for awhile, then I just don't need so much sleep for a few days..then it catches up with me and I manage to get "normal" for awhile...it's kind of bi-yearly, but I'll probably never be great at normal sleeping.... among various groups of people I'm known for both staying up later than everyone and getting up earlier.... it just depends.

Anyway...

This is officially my thanksgiving post, because right now, it's officially thanksgiving.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year:

College Graduation.

Friends, family, and other faithful donors that have committed to giving more than $13,000 toward ministry at Hillsdale

The sovereignty of God despite our own life plans (and indeed, sometimes, in line with them)....

And other things too, I'm sure.

I think my least favorite nickname for any Holiday is "Turkey Day" for thanksgiving.

Gratitude, it seems to me, is one of the most sacred acts in which we can partake...to God and to others. Removing the meaning from Thanksgiving is almost as egregious as taking the meaning from Christmas or Easter, but I don't think we think about it like that all that often. It is, afterall, one of our most "irreligious" of Holidays. Ironically though, I think it is the Holiday we can, by its very nature, do the most "Christian" action through... giving thanks is a charge given in the Bible a lot more than going to church at midnight or 6 am.

Far too often, indeed, much of the time, we make Thanksgiving into a feast for feastings sake...like it exists for the turkey, like it's an excuse for something or other...but there's more to that, at least reflectively.

At that, it's also one of our must individual and reflective holidays, and I like that...although there is something altogether wonderful about the "other-centeredness" that at least should be a large part of Christmas.

Anyway, this is something of a tangent... I guess I'm just asking that, if you're reading this, you're' remembering that giving thanks is important....moreso than it may seem.

I've got other things to be thankful for too...

I'm thankful for love. Well, that's misleading, at least in the cultural context through which most of you are reading this... I mean, more directly, that I'm thankful for all of the love that seems to have caught hold of so many of my closest friends this year. Marriages and engagements abound, and new and reconciled relationships aren't non-existent either. Perhaps the most memorable moments of 2009 are couched in those events.... Mike and Elyssa's wedding weekend, the night Paul and Alicia called me to tell me about their engagement, the news that both Audrey and Meg have sufficiently moved into happy relationships.... I guess if you don't know all or any of those people, that's kind of meaningless to you...but it makes me happy, and I am thankful, to be a member of a sort of group of people that is good at finding love. It's kind of ironic and maybe a tad refreshing, that I'm something of an odd-one-out at the moment, when, in the past 4 years, I had been pretty good at being in relationships. Actually, I'm thankful, too, that I can say I'm thankful for the happiness in these areas for others.... I haven't always been.... oftentimes, indeed, my least favorite thing in the world has been seeing people happily in love... but I'm happily past that now.

Okay, this is getting remarkably self-indulgent....

Sorry about that..

I am also thankful for curry...perhaps, at the moment, most immediately, out of everything else.


And although I am leaving soon, I'm thankful that it seems the end of my time in Ohio (for now that is.... I have a strong suspicion I'll be back before too long) is going to be full of reasons to want to stay..... that hadn't been the case at all since graduation.

Okay, still with the self-indulgence. I'm truly sorry for that....especially because I'm self-indulgent and ambiguous. But last night was one of those nights that makes me want to reach out and hug the world and scream the end of "In My Life" from Les Miserables from every rooftop. And now, I've swung from self-indulgent and ambiguous to over-the-top and ambivalent.

It seems I don't control my styles so well around midnight...and I most certainly don't control much of anything so well, when so much of what I want to say is so wordless deep inside of me.

Some people write because they have something to say... I write because I need to discover what it is I have to say...and sometimes, things are just too complex or at least too unclear inside of me for any sort of description to take shape.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving....as a day, and as an act.

-Zack

"Truth is given by God to us all, in our time, in our turn"
-Les Miserables