Happy First Sunday of Advent!
The printing schedules get hectic during the holidays, so I’m writing this article on Wednesday, the 19th of November. Last week we will have just completed our in-pew appeal together, and I’m grateful ahead of time to all of us able to support such a worthy cause with a good-faith pledge of our generosity. Thank you as well to all who, though unable to give monetarily, have promised an honest commitment for the long term to pray for the fruitfulness of the mission of Catholic education in our diocese.
The old proverb, “It takes a village,” isn’t just about raising kids. As disciples of Jesus, we know it’s also about raising up saints for the Kingdom. I also love the newer, more widely applicable versions of that wisdom: teamwork makes the dream work—and its related cousin—one team, one dream. Some things, the most important things in life, we cannot accomplish without each other or without the Lord’s help. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to keep us updated on numbers for our encouragement and edification.
This weekend, of course, includes our Thanksgiving holiday. So, a very Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. We all learn, hopefully more and more each year, how to count our blessings. The more you practice, the more blessings you find. Even the pains of life have a grateful purpose. In the Lenz family, we celebrated our first Thanksgiving without Grandpa this year, who passed away in January. You learn to be grateful for the people you’ve had with you—and still have with you—to say “I love you” often. To reconcile, to forgive, to use words that build up instead of tear down. To appreciate every day you have on this earth.
I thank God for the clean water out of the tap, for a refrigerator that keeps my food cold. I thank God for climate-controlled heat in the cold-weather months, for the fleece blanket my friend made me all those years ago. I’m thankful for slip-on shoes—what a great and handy invention. I thank God for my health, the ability to use my hands, and I always thank God for ice cream. I often thank the Lord for the astonishing ways that He is faithful to me, despite all my shortcomings. He is praiseworthy in His Son Jesus, who patiently waits in a tabernacle for me all the days of my life, to show me He is still here whenever I visit Him. I thank God, who reveals to me my own worth by giving me opportunities to sacrifice, which little by little make me grow wise and not foolish. God is good in the goodness of my car, of this couch I sit on, and of the tree outside my front porch.
Christ our King promised us He came so that, in our surrender to His Lordship, we might have life and have it more abundantly. And gratitude is the taproot of the abundant life. Praise and thanksgiving will be the eternally abundant life of heaven. Gratefulness is our admission that we are seen, known, and loved by someone good who wills our good. And so therefore we say: blessed be God in all His designs, for having created us to share in His blessed life.
Fr. Brian