ONE LINERS FOR THE SOUL

          THANKSGIVING

          I have had many moments of exhilaration in my life but none quite like last evening when  I drank my first glass of water since my stroke 30 days ago.

          Thanksgiving is not about what you have but your response to what you have.

 

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NO GREATER GIFT

 

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There is no greater gift than being able to remember a home where mother and father were kind and generous with love. There is no more terrible pain than to look back and remember only a mother and father who were thoughtless and cruel and unconcerned.

Which is why all of us be we parents or grandparents need to constantly monitor our behavior less it get out of hand and in so doing wound little hearts and minds.

And then there are those other kind of homes. The kind of homes I read about not that long ago in a newspaper in another city.

It was about two dysfunctional people who were, as do we all, making regular deposits in their memory banks, but the deposits they were making on a rather regular basis deserved no endorsement.

The woman who was writing said that in their household there were only once or twice a year bad, screaming, screeching, door slamming, out-of-control crying fights. And she wrote of this as if it were a positive thing. Only two miserable gut wrenching all out family wars a year?

Why have they acted the way they have all these years?

Does their memory factory bring up memories of parents who acted as they are now acting and they are just repeating what has become a family tradition?

When they were young did they ever go to church and see mom and dad and siblings pray and then go home and not practice what they prayed?

Or, did they not go to church and simply sat in their home classroom learning from mom and dad how one is supposed to act when they are grown up?

Did they learn how to be childish from childish parents who learned how to be childish from childish parents ad infinitum?

Are there Christian families who treat the 13th chapter of First Corinthians with an emphasis on the number 13 as bad rather than on the teachings which are good?

Does it make a difference if it influences on a regular basis how everyone in a household treats each other?

I now share with you something a couple in one of my congregations once shared with me, “We surround each other with unselfishness.” Not selfishness. No! Loving, warming, thoughtful unselfishness. Two memory factories with a glow on.

In a book entitled THE LONGING FOR HOME by Frederick Buechner he writes about the Christian challenge for every Christian parent to make the kind of home that is a haven, a place of peace and understanding and love.

A place where, after a child grows up, he or she longs to return to, rather than grows up and longs to leave and never return to. A place where as adults they fear to return to because they knows it will just be more of what was lived with all their childhood.

“Children are an heritage of the LORD” – Psalm 127:3

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