Avoiding the Obvious Potholes and Other Thanksgiving Survival Tips

Remember that Thanksgiving Day is not a scene in a Hallmark movie, but a chapter in a much bigger story with real people, real places, and a very real God.

Bring your favorite dish to the table, not your favorite grudge.

Let sleeping dogs lie.  Leave the barking dogs at home.

Don’t just say grace.  Practice it.

Be the first to hug.

The best Thanksgivings are the creative ones.  How differently can we make this one?

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.  Romans 12. 18  Even now. Even in this.

Spend more time setting the tone than setting the table.

Remember to thank God….and the host family.

Take Paul’s fashion advice.   Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving one another, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also much forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  Colossians 3. 12-14

What are we really grateful for?  It shows.

If you have to be competitive, choose kindness:   Outdo one another in showing honor.  Romans 12.10

Which seat do we choose?  Head of the table? Or taking the table leg no one else wants?

Leave your cape at home.  You don’t have to be the hero.

Laugh early and often, but not at someone else’s expense.

Don’t let the traditional meal be something no one wants to remember.

No need to replay past documentaries.  We all have histories that God is still redeeming.

It’s more important to be kind than to be right.

Let Christ be the lingering aroma.

Find something you like on the buffet of conversation.

Don’t just look for the joy.  Bring the joy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment, criticism, and burnt rolls. James 2. 13

Be mindful and thankful for those faithful ones who have gone before us.   

Avoid the obvious potholes.

Give thanks in all circumstances.  2 Thessalonians 5. 18   Find something.

Think of it as the one day, possibly the one remaining moment to love that person.

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving…  Psalm 50. 14  I have always thought that the sacrifice of thanksgiving is thanking God even before we see the outcome.

Remember to have fun!

Look for the blessings.  Bring the blessing in many different flavors.  Be the blessing.

Walk differently through that door this year.

Pray your way in.

 

 

Rewiring Our Brains

Decades ago, Dutch believer and concentration camp survivor Corrie Ten Boom recalled one experience of watching her older sister Betsie.  “I remember that when I was in a concentration camp, we were pushed together in a room with 700 people.  The room was built for 200.  Some people started to fight.  Other people joined them. And at last, it was a chaos.  We heard swearing and beating.   And Betsie my sister said, “Corrie, let’s pray. This is dangerous.”  And she prayed, and she prayed, and she prayed.  I will never forget it.   And when she prayed, it was as if a storm laid down.  We heard less swearing and beating.  At last, it was absolutely quiet.”

“And then Betsie said, “Thank You, Lord. Amen.”

“Do you see what happened?”  Corrie pointed out.  “There was a room of 700 prisoners in danger.  And there was one woman who prayed,” she said in her thick Dutch accent in an interview.  Betsie knew what to do.

Corrie and Betsie were placed in an extremely difficult situation, but through her years of growing in relationship with Christ, of studying the Bible, and incessantly praying, Betsie was ready.  She knew to pray.  She had been changed by praying.

As we learn and practice and choose to pray to God and follow Him into situations over and over again, praying literally rewires our brains.  We are not just stronger by it, or smarter, but God is physically connecting and reconnecting microscopic cells.   

Praying, reading scripture, and worshiping are not just something we do, but they are doing something to us.  It physically and spiritually changes us.  The act of praying does not just help us to think differently or allow God to transform our hearts, but it actually physically rewires our brains.

Every day as we go about our lives, whether we realize it or not, we are living out the reality of neuroscience – the physical way our brains work. Whatever we do, for better or for worse, our actions, choices, and practices, develop neural pathways in our brains, connecting and reconnecting a vast network of neurons.

Our brains can change physically in ways that “move us toward Christlikeness,” observes Dr. Laura Barwegen, a professor at Wheaton College. “Beginning in the womb, neurons [our brain cells] grow thin branches, or dendrites, that link one neuron to another. Neurons can develop thousands of these links over our lifetimes. These connections enable us to blink and breathe, and they give rise to the thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and behavioral patterns that make us who we are.”

And so, those connections are strengthened through intentionally exercising those pathways and building on past experience.  What we choose in a particular situation becomes a physical response for when that situation comes up again.

Our attitudes and actions connect and reconnect those little life-changing neurons.  Not just revealing “this is the way to handle this particular situation,” not just being mindful but having the mind of Christ in familiar situations and in the unexpected.   Quite literally, our minds are being changed by seeking God through praying and reading Scripture.

When we choose to pray, something physically changes within us.  The very act of praying is choosing to take a different pathway.  And like a trail through a thicket soon becomes a familiar path, and then a well-worn way through the wilderness, developing into a trusted road, we know what to do in difficulty:  we can pray.

When we pray, God reveals different dimensions that are already there.  We see differently what is before us.  We spiritually, emotionally, and physically respond differently. When we pray, listen, meditate on His Word, and worship God, something changes in how we approach the familiar and the unexpected, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the difficult. God engraves in our hearts what He repeats over and over in Scripture:  Do not fear.  I am with you.

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away.  Behold, the new has come. 2 Corinthians 5. 17   We can live that way.  What pathways are we walking, what practices and defaults do we choose?  We can pray.  Or we can let worry, fear, and anxiety distract us, drain us, and physically raise our blood pressure.

We don’t often think that by praying about something, we are being changed physically in the process. God does not just make inroads into our hearts, but rewires our brains.  And in desperate split-second situations or long times of suffering and pain, our default by praying leads us on different neural pathways, right to Him.

Praying spills over from one incident into innumerable other occasions. How we respond prepares us, equips us, opens us to the next situation, a little wiser, a lot stronger, and found in Him.

I can’t even go out for a short run without it changing me in multiple ways.  What if praying did the same?  Would we pray differently?

 

What's The One Thing?

 

I am working my way through the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.  I don’t understand it all.  I never will.  But as in any reading of the Bible, I can hold with both hands what I can comprehend.  And then the next time through, there is always something more that I never realized before. 

One of our daughters’ Bible study leaders once emphasized to her (and to me), when reading Scripture, to watch for repeated phrases.  It is like God is underlining those truths.  And if we don’t get it the first time, perhaps the second or third mention will get our attention.  In the 48 chapters of Ezekiel which was written in the sixth century B.C., God emphasizes 68 times the phrase “that they shall know that I am the LORD.”

That is the one thing we need to get, to grasp, to understand, no matter the circumstances thousands of years ago, no matter the situation we face today: that we will know that He is the LORD. 

Because when we know, acknowledge, and recognize God, nothing remains the same.  When we set our eyes on God, we see circumstances with a deeper vision and a different heart.  This is no random occurrence, no meaningless disaster, nothing that God cannot redeem.  We think about, approach, navigate and respond differently because we believe and trust in the Almighty.  God gives us the ability to pivot, stand within, remain faithful to His calling, be in touch with His nudges, flee when necessary, and walk with Him no matter the road, yes, even this way. 

Just because it is difficult, impossible and ugly, does not mean that it isn’t right in the center of His will.  The ultimate triumph in this situation may be learning to trust God in this.  And when we pray, we trust Him more.  And in learning to pray and trust, God imparts His strength in us for what we don’t see coming.

As a young man during the Civil War, Thomas lived in the volatile border state of Kentucky where literally neighbors and brothers were often on both sides of the conflict.  One evening as he was headed alone down the hilly curving dirt road on his way home from the fields, he heard a Confederate contingent coming toward him, indeed just about to come around the bend.  His life was at stake for the space of just several yards.  LORD, help me, he whispered as he scurried behind a large rock in a clump of trees (and in the shadow of God’s hand.)  Instead of cowering in fear, he called out with a loud and courageous voice, “C’mon boys, we’ve got ‘em now!”

Thinking it was an ambush, the soldiers scattered, running for their lives in the opposite direction.  And Thomas walked on home. 

When we pray, God says, “Now watch this.”  Because what we see as an interruption, or pothole, or impossible task, God transforms into divine appointments and sacred encounters that He lined up not for our fear, but for His glory.

In prayer, God translates circumstances into His mercy, His covering, His revealing, and His redeeming.  When we walk into the day with Him, God fills us with a sense of wonder, not just when we see His tangible hand, but what else do we miss because we are not looking…or not praying?  

And they shall know that I am the LORD.  68 times. What does it take for us to realize that?  The last four words of that book says it all.  The LORD is there.  Ezekiel 48. 35  

Thomas saw that truth before his eyes on a dirt road.  And on that reality, we can stake our lives.

Those little glimpses of His Presence are not just for us to tuck in a drawer, but to share.  We can never know who will be impacted not just by our prayers, but the stories that God has given each one of us, even on the most ordinary days.

With God we shall do valiantly.  It is He who will tread down our foes.  Psalm 108. 13   Anything we fear, both real and imagined.  There is a different reality going on here.

Thomas’s story always has touched me.  God is here.  We can know Him.  We can trust Him.  Even when we cannot understand, He is working still.  Even when we have no idea what is coming around the bend, God is with me too.

I heard that story long ago from my grandmother.  Thomas was her father – the great grandfather I never met.  I don’t know much about him, but he spoke to his children what he had seen and how he knew the faithfulness of God.  That is the one thing I know about him, the legacy that he left.

We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deed of the LORD, and His might, and the wonders that He has done…to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God.   Psalm 78. 4-7

In praying, things cannot remain as they are, nor can we.  It is not that we open the door for God to do something, but instead, He invites us in.

What story is God unfolding before us today?  What is the one thing we can pray?  That we would know that He is the Lord.  Everything revolves around that.