A Thanksgiving Message
By Jack Dunigan
How the church I used to pastor has now become the world we live in
It was a miserable bunch. On the first Sunday of November, 1997, I challenged and encouraged the church to make Thanksgiving a month-long celebration. Instead of giving thanks on one Thursday, I asked them to personally declare thirty days of thanks.
I exhorted them to abandon complaining and griping, replacing it with expressions of gratitude and gratefulness for the next month. Seeing the downside of life can become an enslaving habit. Focusing on the negative, the incomplete, the inadequate, the failures, and the disappointing can overwhelm and infect life with a misery as deep, dark, and eventually impenetrable as the blackest dungeon. Let him who would intend to love life and see good days refrain his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking guile wrote the writer of the first epistle of Peter.
It was, in reality, a simple request. It was also, in retrospect, doomed to fail.
Why? Because they were, for the most part, a people whose pain and disappointment had become their claim to fame. It was what was wrong, or what they perceived to be wrong, that identified them and to which they laid claim as a badge. Bad news was, for them, good news. To put it more bluntly, if it was not negative and bad, they neither repeated it nor wanted to hear it.
How do I know? Because I had no sooner got home when the phone started to ring. “We have a right to complain.” “You’re trying to suppress us and are ignoring our pain.” “You are trying to tell us how to live.” (Actually, that one was true. I was.)
I created a firestorm of opposition by the simple act of suggesting that thanks and thanksgiving might be a better way to live.
Well, I didn’t last long there. In under a year I was gone and glad to be. They were…and as far as I can tell…still are a bunch insistent on wallowing in misery.
I had thought and hoped it was an isolated circumstance, but I now think I might be wrong about that because I keep hearing the same reasons.
