What if You're Not Feeling #soblessed?

Ugh. Why are all of these people thankful for such happy things?

This uncharitable sentiment is brought to you by…well, me. It was my first instinct as I scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed this month and saw an explosion of thanks-giving. My second instinct was to be deeply ashamed that I grumbled about heartwarming posts about “the LOVE of my LIFE,” the ones marked cheerily with “#soblessed.”

Pinterest has a lot of happy, thankful people (who make pretty memes).

And another part of me felt a little smug that I was not at the point of publicly gushing a list of wonderful things about my life to social media. Because sad is happy for deep people.

So I started writing a response to those Facebook posts:

There are some very happy things that I’m thankful for. I’m thankful for the smell of something cooking in my Crockpot when I come back to my apartment. I’m thankful for that feeling that settles over you when you sing old hymns and they still mean something. I’m thankful for crunch fall leaves, wonderful co-workers, good books, hearing little kids laugh, friends who care about me, people with British accents reading audiobooks, discovering I actually like oatmeal, and all the other blessings that it’s okay to put on Facebook.

But there are other things I’m thankful for.

I am thankful for weakness—from the ache of fragility during fasting to tiny risks of being honest with others.

I am thankful for uncertainty, especially the kind that comes with humility about something bigger than me.

I am thankful for fear of inadequacy, because it’s a nice change from pride.

I am thankful for silence, for the focus it provides and for the way it jerks the approval of others completely out of your possible motivations for doing something.

I am thankful even for silence from God, and I’m not quite sure why yet, except that if God always did what I demanded and responded when I wanted, he wouldn’t be much of a god.

I am thankful for goodbyes and the way they hurt, for mail that can’t turn into hugs, for conversations that won’t happen anymore, for long-distance friendships that aren’t the same, because they are broken things that point to a reality where brokenness won’t exist.

Go Shopping, Fight Nazis

Today, I went Black Friday shopping. And guess what? No Nazis tried to threaten me to stay away from certain stores.

What, that’s not surprising to you? Maybe I’m just sensitive to the issue because I’m reading Eric Metaxas’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. Suddenly, I’m expecting to see swastikas on every street corner, especially because of my favorite part of the book so far, a story about Bonhoeffer’s grandma.

It was early 1933. Sometimes I think that Hitler just kind of exploded on the world scene when the war started in 1939. But that’s not usually the way history works. Things change slowly, quietly, through subtle propaganda and redefined terms and committee meetings.

Most Germans didn’t really know what was happening. They knew their hero Martin Luther, at the end of his life at least, had some violently anti-Semetic things to say. And they thought they knew, based on Hitler’s various accusations, that the Jews were controlling the press overseas and spreading lies about Germany. They didn’t see the death camps coming. All they saw was a day in April when all loyal citizens of Germany were supposed to peacefully boycott Jewish stores in protest of the Jews' anti-German attitudes and actions.

And, on that day in April 1933, 90-year-old Julie Bonhoeffer went shopping. 

Defending Thanksgiving

If you want to start a heated conversation, casually ask a group, “So, what do you think about playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving?” Immediately, people will start shouting, pounding their fists on the table, and throwing various items of food and Fiestaware at those of differing opinions.

Okay, so maybe not. But I have gotten some pretty heated responses when I’ve asked this question over the past few days, everything from, “It’s a sin” to “It just makes me so happy inside that I can’t wait.”

I am one of those crotchety people who is against Christmas music before Thanksgiving. Just against, not violently opposed. I’m not going to go torch your computer if I hear strains of “The Little Drummer Boy” coming from your Spotify account. (I used to have this as "Sleigh Ride, until one of my apartment-mates reminded me that this song, along with "Jingle Bells" was once a Thanksgiving song, of all things. So, in theory, those two are acceptable, although I question the legitimacy of this logic.) Still, I think there’s something to be said about letting Thanksgiving have its time before rushing on to the next thing.

I love Christmas, don’t get me wrong. But I think most of us could agree on two things: Thanksgiving is highly underappreciated, and in a contest for ideological purity, it would beat Christmas any day. Why? Because Thanksgiving is about giving thanks, while Christmas is about giving stuff.

A Writer's List of Blessings

I don’t know about you, but just thinking about counting my blessings overwhelms me sometimes. I started to list just the people in my life who have had an impact on me, and I had to stop after three full single-spaced pages.

So I’m subdividing my life into categories and making lists.

Those of you who didn’t appreciate the magnitude of that sentence clearly do not know me very well. I, the unorganized one, do not subdivide anything, and I avoid making lists whenever possible. In the spirit of the holidays, though, I decided to make an exception.