Recently my son, who lives away in grad school, made his father and me smile when we received a thank-you letter. It contained a list of incidental things for which he was grateful including things like his birthday present, the laundry I had done when he was home, the haircut I had given him, and Glenn’s help with a car repair. Then along about number five in the list was simply the words “Giving birth to me and raising me.” The comment beneath the list was “I am hoping I can bundle these services.”
We love that boy. He has a subtle sense of humor.
Sometimes we are that way in our gratitude to the heavenly Father. We pray and we thank him for a list of temporal blessings and then we may or may not mention that we are grateful that he gave us life and is “raising” us to be fit for heaven. May we, on this Thanksgiving day, not fail to remember that, of all of the bundled services (and that is quite a bundle of good and perfect gifts), there is that one gift that makes life and all of its attendant blessings worth the living and enjoying. The gift of eternal life through Christ is the blessing that bears all blessings. It’s the mother blessing through which I come to view with gratitude all of my other gifts. It’s the gift that gives meaning to the material and the funnel through which all others are poured. It is THE gift. It’s what makes my life a channel of bundled services. May I keep all the blessings tied to the ultimate gift.
PS. I read this to Caleb during our Bible time tonight and he added this correction: “Mom, I would have never said you ‘raised’ me. ‘Raising’ is for animals. ‘Rearing’ is for people.” Okay. Sometimes it just seemed like a zoo around here.
