This year has flown by. It was just Christmas last week and now it’s Thanksgiving. All over America, we sit down to tables laden with a plethora of food and dainties served on paper china and plastic crystal. We even lay out the plastic flatware tinted with silver or gold. It is too much trouble to wash the fancy dinnerware as we did when I was a child. Sometimes candles flicker over the table, showering light over the glorious event. We sometimes just fill our plates from the counter and sit down in our comfy chair. Sometimes we say an obligatory thanks to the cook, but our thoughts are on the turkey, the pies and the trimmings. Sometimes we say grace, we eat too much and then it is over. We go about our lives preparing for Christmas.
Like little robots, we scurry from place to place in our air-conditioned cars, shopping in stores that are overfilled with the luxuries of life. We pick over the vegetables and fruit for the best and leave the imperfect on the stack. We move through the bread section and choose the loaves that suit our fancy. We open refrigerated compartments for milk, cheese and butter. We meander down rows of canned goods choosing contents from glossy computer-generated labels. We sift through the frozen food section deciding if we want to cook our own or buy something prepackaged.
In the apparel section, we wrinkle up our nose at the latest fashion and buy only the clothes that tickle our preference. We don’t even notice that everything is made in several different sizes unless our size doesn’t happen to be on the rack.
The shoe section topples with shoes of every shape and size. We hem and haw, lifting this one and that one, scowling at the price and the quality before we meander on, complaining at the crowded atmosphere.
The furniture store is plush with comfort and convenience. We sit for a while thinking it would be nice to have new furniture instead of the year-old ones we have at home. We envy the color coordination of the display and wonder when we will have new paint and carpet. We silently blame our employer for not giving us a raise and more time off. We glance at that TV display and realize that ours is smaller. We mentally calculate if we could squeeze one more payment out of our budget before wearying with envy, and we make our way to the checkout stands where we have to wait in line behind other disgruntled shoppers.
The self-checkout doesn’t smile, but the automated voice greets you with a canned welcome and we load the purchases into our cart and wheel them to our car. Our credit card is stuffed back into our wallet, and we push our carts from the store, weary with so much shopping and wonder what we will do if the prices keep going up.
I wonder what it would be like if the Mayflower travelers of 1620 were allowed to enter a department store. When they began to understand the plenty, they would fall on their faces with gratitude for the miracles that lay before them. Their tears would polish the floor at the thought of even being allowed to glimpse such magnificent wealth, and they would puzzle over our blindness and ingratitude.
We indeed live in a world of miracles. We see miracles every day, and we pass them over like they were part of nature. Our smartphones are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) and apps that boggle the mind. We can preserve a memory in seconds with pictures and audio and send it across the world in nanoseconds. We blink and wonder why it is taking so long.
The sun rises and the sun sets, and we seldom take notice of the changing sky. We ritualistically say, “Thank you,” but our hearts are plagued with the numbness of having tasted too many sweets, seen too many colors and slept too many nights on velvet pillows. We do not notice the glory of God. We don’t comprehend what it means to be grateful.
The Lord has a remedy for our numbness. It is called rejoicing. The Bible says:
“But let the righteous be glad; let them rejoice before God: yea, let them exceedingly rejoice. Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name, and rejoice before him.”—Psalms 68:3-4 (KJV)
Rejoicing is different than just plain gratitude. Gratitude can be fake. You can smile and say, “Thank you.” You can even pray in the attitude of gratitude. You can name off your blessings one by one and not really feel grateful. Rejoicing, on the other hand, means to delight in something or feel great joy. Rejoicing comes from the heart. In order to rejoice, you have to feel it. You heart cannot be numb or indifferent. It must be soft with the recognition of the bounties God has given. In rejoicing, the emotions are tied to the words and the heart. You can’t fake that.
We are not just supposed to rejoice; we are to exceedingly rejoice. Exceedingly means to the extreme. Extreme means pushing the limits, going beyond what is expected.
Why would the Lord want us to go to the extreme of feeling joy?
When I was in an acting class years ago. I realized something about emotion and the ability to emote, or express feeling. Expressing emotions, for good or ill, seems to hollow out caverns in the hearts. The more emotion we express, the deeper the cavern becomes. For example, if we hollow out the cavern of our heart and fill it with anger, eventually we will be able to rage with uncontrollable anger on stage. (Be careful, though, real life is not a stage. Anger will overpower us if we allow it to go unchecked.) On the other hand, if we carve out the caverns of our hearts with rejoicing, we will be able to feel and express an infinite amount of delight and joy. It is interesting: When the caverns of the heart are empty of anger, jealousy and pride, they can be filled with other sentiments. We can fill those caverns with compassion and charity. This realization gives credence and understanding to Revelations 3:15-16 (KJV): “I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
The Lord wants us to be people of passion and purpose. He wants us to express those emotions in a productive and compassionate way. He wants our hearts, our minds and our mouths to be connected to the soft inner workings of the spirit. God isn’t looking for robots that express grateful words on Thanksgiving Day. He wants total and exceeding great rejoicing over the great blessing He has given to us. We can’t do that if we are only thinking of the turkey and pies. We cannot do that without learning to feel joy daily for the mercies God has given us through the year.
The Pilgrims rejoiced exceedingly at their bounty because they took note of every blessing. They were grateful for the food because they knew what it was to be hungry. They were grateful for the warmth of the fire because they knew what it was to huddle together in the frigid winters of Plymouth. They rejoiced to have a family because they knew what it was like to lose family members in the icy snow of 1620. They found delight in their apparel because they knew what it was like to wear rags.
It is difficult for America to escape the life of ease and opulence because we are surrounded on every side with wealth and prosperity, but we can take ourselves out of our affluence by prayer and by doing what the Lord commanded the children of Israel to do – fast.
We can give our bread to the hungry. We can delight in the Sabbath of the Lord, and we can satisfy the afflicted soul. This doesn’t mean to give because we have much to give. We need to give until it hurts a little. Then and only then will the caverns of the heart expand to be filled with the rejoicing that God intended on this Thanksgiving Day.
