As colleague Mark Miller has lamented (in between digressions), the Christmas season tends to steal the holiday spotlight from its meeker, milder and less-commercial-friendly kin, Thanksgiving.
Admittedly, I unapologetically believe people should celebrate the incarnation of the King of kings year-round, particularly with Christmas carols. Still, in the spirit of the Prince of Peace, I want to bless those who prefer the day people count their blessings (and stop counting their carbs). I want to share some Thanksgiving stories ripe for a cozy fireplace, pumpkin pie and some grandchildren.
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Sisters Corrie and Betsie Ten Boom entered their barracks at the Ravensbruck concentration camp and walked single file between the rows of “beds.” Actually, they walked between wooden platforms stacked three deep, with such a narrow gap between each one that the sisters couldn’t sit up without banging their heads on the one above.
But Corrie sat up and banged her head anyway when the first flea bit her.
The sisters quickly escaped to an aisle, where Corrie cried, “Betsie, how can we live in such a place?”
“Show us. Show us how,” Betsie prayed, and God responded. Betsie told Corrie to open the Bible and re-read the verse they had read earlier. “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus …” Corrie started reading.
“That’s His answer,” Betsie said before her sister could finish.
So they thanked God they were assigned together; they thanked Him for the Bible, but when Betsie thanked God for the fleas, Corrie could not say amen.
“In every thing give thanks,” Betsie repeated. “It doesn’t say, ‘In pleasant circumstances,” and she again thanked God — out loud — for the fleas.
As time passed, the sisters learned they could also thank God for the apparently lackadaisical guards. In fact, the sisters could more readily read Scripture out loud because these guards didn’t unexpectedly barge into the barracks.
And one day, Betsie discovered why, and with a twinkle in her eye, she told Corrie.
The guards, Bestie said, hated the fleas.
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During her senior year, Joni Eareckson Tada asked God to “really work in my life.”
And shortly after that prayer, she dove into a pond, struck her head, and broke her neck, paralyzing her body for the rest of her mortal life.
In the following months, Tada twice would have killed herself if she could, later writing she could never “find purpose or meaning in just existing day after day.”
However, through her friend’s discipleship, Bible study, prayer, and God’s patience, she slowly stumbled into a deeper relationship with God, and she eventually found meaning without the routines and accomplishments that had once defined her life. “When I had been on my feet, it never seemed important that (God) be part of my decision-making,” she wrote, but because of her struggles, she started realizing, “He was, in fact, my only dependable reality.
“My life has meaning when I glorify God,” she concluded.
Years after the accident, someone asked Tada if God paralyzed her — or at least allowed her to be paralyzed — because of her stubbornness.
Tada said no, but she admitted that, considering her shallow faith before the accident, “Maybe He knew I’d be ultimately happier serving Him.
“If I were still on my feet … I probably would have drifted through life … dissatisfied and disillusioned.
“I’m really thankful He did something to get my attention and change me,” she said.
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Three-year-old Amy Carmichael ran to the mirror one morning to look at her eyes. She had asked God the night before to transform her plain brown eyes into beautiful blue eyes, like those of her mother, who had assured her that, “God always answers prayers.”
And God did indeed answer Amy’s prayers.
He said no.
About 24 years later, Amy arrived in India to work as a missionary, and in March 1901, she met Preena.
Preena’s mother had earlier sold or given her daughter to the temple and its Hindu priests, who often used such girls as prostitutes. Preena, though, had ran away and fled back to her mother, but her mother forced Preena to return to the temple.
As punishment, the women in the temple branded the 7-year-old’s hands with a hot iron.
However, Preena dared to run away again, and this time, she found a Christian woman who took the child to Carmichael.
The two never parted, and Carmichael knew God had called her to India to rescue other temple children.
However, she needed more than the testimony of a 7-year-old to convince others to help. She needed to witness the lives of the temple children firsthand.
Carmichael then decided to stain her skin brown, and she successfully and anonymously entered one of the temples.
However, this disguise would probably not have fooled the men and women there if God had answered her prayers years ago.
No Indian woman, after all, had beautiful blue eyes.
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