Up the Sunbeam

The homey fragrance wafts its way from the kitchen throughout the whole house, bringing with it memories of other times and places, other kitchens made warm and pleasantly steamy from an oven full of homemade bread. Of course the first one that comes to mind is the kitchen I grew up in, the kitchen in Canada where I learned under the patient and practiced hand of my mother how to measure and mix, to knead and form dough into loaves or rolls. How I loved to come home from school to find her just taking one of her beautiful creations out of the oven--best after school snack EVER!! I remember visits to a tiny kitchen in South Dakota where my Great Auntie Bess made homemade bread that was like food for the angels. I remember Thanksgiving Days in Iowa in the kitchen of my Auntie Marilyn, and of course my Grandma Ellen in her big old Iowa farmhouse, and my Grandma Laurene in the little yellow house my Grandpa built for her. Here in California, in my own kitchen, I have been baking bread f...

"God is sometimes the strength of His people, when He is not their song" IVP NT Commentary on Psalm 118 Have you ever been there--are you there now--where God is holding you together, but your heart just cannot find a song?  You want to sing, but you don't have the spiritual breath it takes to run the notes through your vocal chords.  You WANT to be thankful--but REALLY thankful, not just listing gratitude because you're SUPPOSED TO and you know you SHOULD be thankful for so many things.  Underneath the debris of current hardships, you are actually thankful for these things but you can hardly find them in the clutter of your messy emotions.  You're fighting the cloying fumes of fear that everything you're thankful for today might be gone tomorrow because you're thinking of things you've already lost. Uh-huh . . . me too. So where do you run to find the real from-the-inside-out kind of gratitude that makes Thanksgiving spring out of you like a so...

-- Listen! Can you hear them? Can you hear the echoes of that very first Thanksgiving feast? In the hustle bustle of the kitchen with clanking pans and sizzling turkeys, listen close and you'll hear the distant sounds of women cooking over open fires, turning the spit for hours as the meat grew more fragrant and delicious by each turn. I wonder if they had any idea that we would still be following their lead and continuing their tradition 388 years later. Their hearts must have been so full as they reflected on all God had brought them through. They must have been keenly aware of missing people from home, and of the loss of friends and family who had started out with them, but who had not survived this far. They must have held each other that much more closely in this celebration of harvest and life, hope and freedom, all out of their gratitude to Almighty God who held them together. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tracing . . . tracing . . . tracing . . . generation upon g...