Hello,
Today, I write the Bungee Cord having just spent the last
week with my three adult sons in Denver.
Two of them live there. The
other flew in from New York City.
It is a different Turkey Table now a days in many ways, but traces of
Thanksgiving tables when we didn’t have to travel to be together still
appear. Sitting around the table
with them and spending the week with them is a delight that this parent
treasures and takes in with thanks.
But I’m back now; back in the familiar settings of my own home,
surrounded by the relative silence of the empty nest. There’s a difference, though, as I sit upon the couch today
from my sitting here a week ago, and the difference is a soul settled sense of
peace. One might conjecture that
this peace has taken hold of my heart because of the contrast of the frenetic
energy that stirs when I’m back with my kids. There is an increased stirring that matches the highest
level of a kitchen mixer when all three of them lower themselves into the bowl
of our life. But I don’t think
that is where the peace that I feel today comes from.
I believe that the peace that has taken hold of my soul has
come from having been snatched away for a week by the things that matter
deepest in my life. Far too easily
do the semi-important, mildly important, and truthfully really unimportant
things have a way of tethering themselves to me, tangling me up in them like
yards and yards of kite string. To
have my kids tease me about my aged foolishness, to hear them banter with one
another, to see them taking on lives of their own, to be invited to share in
their dreams and aspirations….well, it was like scissors slicing me free from
life-sapping entanglements. That
is not to say that their lives are perfect and unfettered with difficulties,
but even sharing their struggles has a way of freeing me from the lesser
important things in life to be engaged in the what is far more important.
I don’t think that I am alone in being snagged by life’s
tangling strings. As a matter of
fact, I know that I am not. Getting
tangled up in the omnipresent trip-cords of life is impossible not to do. Everyone needs to have table time, like
I have just had, to snip them free
from all those things that entangle us to death so we might be able to take a
deep breath of all those things that are full of life and give us life.
I hope that is what Sunday morning around the Thanksgiving
table of the Lord is all about.
(Interestingly enough, one of the words that we use for this weekly meal
is “The Eucharist”, whose Greek root word is “Thanksgiving”.) I hope that when folks gather around
this table where the bread of life and the cup of salvation are shared people
experience the grace of the Lord snatching them away from all the things that
are suffocatingly entangling them and freeing them to be engaged in life, life
abundant in hope, joy and peace.
I know that that what happens to me. Although it may seem to be only piece
of bread and a sip of wine, my ears are captured by the promise that it is
more, God’s promise that his presence is tangibly entangled therein. And in a
profound way that words and reason cannot capture, I can feel the snipping of
all that the world had tethered me in entanglement, and my lungs freed to take
in a soul cleansing breath that enlivens when I dine at the Lord’s table.
The peace that I wallow in today from my week with my kids
will soon fall prey to the world’s entanglements, and so I look forward to the
table time that we will have again.
Likewise, the peace that soothes me from dining at the Lord’s table is
always soon snagged by the trip-cords of life, and so I look forward to the
Lord’s table time that I will also have again.
I hope that your Thanksgiving table time brought the
refreshment that mine did, and know this: there is a standing invitation at the
Lord’s Thanksgiving (Eucharist) table every Sunday in which the Lord seeks to exponentially
greater refresh your life with his divine mercy and grace.
Have a great week.
God’s grace and peace, (ggap)
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
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