Thanksgiving 2005

Thanksgiving, 2005
By P. Davis

Thanksgiving is over.  Whew!  All the family and the food gone.  Another year gone.  And I am another year older, but probably not another year better. I want so much to be better with each year, but the wrinkles come and come, and I still wrestle with the same me that I wrestled with even when a youngster.
     And that has brought me to a truth.  An “I wonder about truth”.  I am really thankful for lots this year.  My father yet lives and walks.  So do both of my in laws.  I have three wonderful grandsons beginning to grapple with realizing their own shortcomings.  And they are beginning to unravel their own strings that represent the joyous yarn of living.
     While I am so thankful, I do realize with age that some things do not change, at least in the few years of our life.  I wonder about my father, who I prayed for so long ago.  As he lay upon what I thought would be his deathbed, I prayed to God, who in His mercy heard and answered.  I prayed for extra years to be added to his life, that he might yet have time to see the grace of God that is provided for in Jesus.
     I have watched God deal with my father during these successive years, and watched most anxiously as He would steer my father so close, and then....  My father would pull away once more, tantalizingly coming so close, and yet so far from redemption.
     Which brings me back from my digression.  My “I wonder” for this weekend is whether adding years would do anything for the salvation of my dad.  I lay in my bed this morning wondering about praying for more years for my dad.  I see his hurts, his aches and pains grow, and not his alone, but also those of my in laws.   I see the frailness of their shell that used to hold such hearty promise of life, and now that shell has become so thin and fragile so as to almost be translucent, waiting for just the slightest knock to break it irretrievably.  How I hate death!  I abhor that which must come, unless the Day of the Lord should redeem us.  Even so, come Lord Jesus, come.
     And may my father, even in his eleventh and one half hour, still find the mercy of Jesus Christ.