One snowy night halfway through December, we hosted housechurch at our house, and in a fit of dementia and good intentions, I decided to cook a Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, with a turkey. Yes, even though I barely know how to cook boneless skinless chicken breasts. Yes, even though I have a newborn. Yes, several weeks after the actual holiday.

But it had been ages since we’d hosted housechurch, since before Henry was born, and I missed it, missed the cooking and the table setting and the sounds of their voices in our home, and I wanted it to be special, to feel like a party or a holiday. And I realized as well that I wanted to celebrate the holiday with them. We talk about being one another’s family, and that has become so true that when a family time comes, like a holiday, it doesn’t feel right to spend it without them.

I had two Thanksgiving dinners already this year, one with my parents and Aaron and Henry. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, actually, which was my mom’s birthday. I had watched Rachael Ray make stuffing on her show with caramelized onions and apples, so I tried that, and because there were only a few of us, we did a little turkey breast, instead of the whole deal. The next day, at Aaron’s parents’ house, we had a fabulous meal. My mother-in-law was planning on cooking, but her back went out, and so one of their friends, a caterer, cooked double and brought over his amazing fancy Thanksgiving food. Diane’s a great cook, but we were all a little thankful for her bad back when we tasted the sausage and mushroom stuffing.

All that to say, even though I did the meal part of Thanksgiving twice, I never did the thanks part, the part where you stop and think about the year, and think about what you’re thankful for, or what you’ve been given, or the gratitude you feel toward the -people you love and to God for his good gifts.

And so, Thanksgiving at our house, in December. And December in Grand Rapids, as Annette puts it, is like living in a snow globe. There are months and months in the spring of that ugly dirty snow that dogs have peed in and boots have mashed down, but in December, it’s that magical movie snow, with swirling huge flakes and thick blankets of snow on rooftops and yellow streetlamp light making everything look dreamy and just as it should be.

I set the table all fancy, with silver chargers and balloon wine glasses and silver candlesticks with long red tapers, and a platter on the coffee table with seven flutes of champagne. We listened to Sufjan Stevens’s new Christmas album, which is beautiful and strange, and of course the turkey took like nine hours longer than the recipe said it would, so we had lots of time to drink our champagne and catch up and cuddle with Henry and Spence before their bedtimes.

When the turkey finally decided to be done, after a zillion years, we sat in the twinkly, candlelit dining room and ate stuffing and smashed potatoes and the old-school green bean casserole with the crunchy onions on top. I had flirted briefly with the idea of making updated, sophisticated green beans, like I saw on the Food Network, with mushrooms cooked in wine and onions, but I couldn’t make myself do it, because I love the old-time ones with the cream of celery soup so much.

While we ate, we talked about the time we’d spent with our families over the holiday, about the things that change and the things that never do. Joe, who is an expert at not talking about things he doesn’t want to talk about, invited us directly and honestly into some of the decisions he’s making this year. We stayed at the table for an extra long time, having seconds and listening. We talked about gratitude, and about how there are things that are easy to be thankful for. Henry, for example, is an uncomplicated happiness, as is my family and my marriage and the housechurch.

What I’ve found this year, though, is a different kind of gratitude. When I left my job, in the swirling pain and confusion of that season, a few people told me that at some point, I would be happy for this, thankful, even. That didn’t sit well with me, and it felt even worse than the clichés about closing doors and opening windows. It felt cruel: not only was I supposed to not be sad, I was supposed to be thankful? It felt inauthentic and creepy, and I swore to myself that even if I healed someday, even if the pain abated, even if I was happy again, I would never ever be thankful for this. I would never be like one of those -people who’s thankful for cancer because of what it taught them, or thankful for the divorce for teaching them to be independent. I would never be thankful for this.

And then, the week of Thanksgiving, I went with my family to the house of some wonderful, generous family friends. The last time I had been there was the day after I left my job. And being there again brought me right back to that place, and showed me, to my surprise, the distance I had traveled in the intervening months. I looked back through my journal, and I stood in the places I remembered standing on that first trip, and I looked out at the ocean at the same times of day, to see the same colors on the same sky, and I realized I am different. And not only different, but better, and not only better, but thankful.

I am thankful, I realized in those moments, thankful for the breaking of things that needed to be broken, that couldn’t have been broken any other way, thankful for the severing that allowed me to fall all the way down to the center of my fear and look it in the face, thankful for being set free from something I didn’t even know I was enslaved to. There is a quality in my life that I sense now, like a rumbling bass line, or thunder faraway, and the only phrase I can find to capture it is that it is the feeling of having nothing to lose. I have nothing lef t to lose. Because I was embarrassed and ashamed in such a deep way, and to my surprise, I’m still here. I’m happy in a new way, free in a new way.

I am all the clichés that made me so mad several months ago. I believe in the gift of pain. I believe that loss deepens us. I believe all those things that made me throw a Larry Crabb book against the wall eight months ago. No offense, certainly, to Larry Crabb, who is a wise person, but I was nowhere near ready for his words at the time. I am grateful for God’s graciousness toward me that he would teach me these things. And I could gag at that sentence, for how Pollyanna it sounds. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve found a new gratitude, and it’s gratitude for the way God has redeemed darkness and pain, for the way he brings something beautiful out of something horrible. That’s the kind of gratitude we talked about on our snowy Thanksgiving night.

We talked about the ways that God’s hand has reached through the darkness in each of our lives. And in those moments, we became more than the sum of our parts, and more than we had been, previously, as a community.

While our babies slept upstairs, and the leftovers and turkey bones littered the table, we told the stories that no one tells, the stories of the darkest places, the most painful moments, and the ways God has held those moments up and turned them from ash to luminous things, treasures, shards of hope.

When we stood in a circle to pray and close our night together, we held hands and thanked God for the darkness, and for the way the darkness had become light, and in that moment, we practiced Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the uncomplicated happiness of babies and friendship and food, and for the very complicated joys that come from loss, from failure, from reaching the bottom and pushing back up to the light.

That’s a Happy Thanksgiving.

Excerpted from Cold Tangerines, Shauna Niequist
Zondervan, October, 2007

Shauna Niequist grew up at Willow Creek Community Church, then studied English and French literature at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. She worked at Willow Creek for five years and at Mars Hill, in Grandville, Michigan, for three years, and is a part of the Mars Hill Community. Her first book, Cold Tangerines, a collection of essays about the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives, was released in September.  
 
http://www.shaunaniequist.com/

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