An enduring savor

Julia ♦ September 25, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

Jackie and Virginia Costen and I enjoy a dinner that can’t be bought, Thanksgiving 2015

“If I summon up those memories that have left me with an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Most likely, today will seem like just another day in your life. But look again. There is something quite beautiful hidden in today, something you will one day long to have again.

Thanksgiving 2015 seemed fairly uneventful to us at the time, especially when compared with other holidays we had spent celebrating with extended family. Drew and Megan had bought a new home, and their move-in was scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend that year. Also, Daddy’s recent death was still fresh in our minds, and we didn’t feel like planning a big celebration. Jeff, Matt and I would have spent the holiday alone, except that our church family has a tradition of always holding a Thanksgiving meal at the building for anyone who has no big gathering to attend elsewhere.

One year, Thanksgiving happened to fall on our church’s turn in the rotation to work at the local homeless shelter, so we had a festive Thanksgiving there with a huge crowd of people we mostly had never seen before, but it was a wonderful and quite memorable holiday for us. The sincere gratitude shown by people who literally had nowhere else to sleep at night, or even come in from the cold for a few hours, was a humbling experience. It gave new meaning to the holiday.

But in 2015, it was just a typical group who gathered at the aging fellowship hall of our church to enjoy one another’s company while sharing a pot luck Thanksgiving meal. To quote from Arlo Guthrie’s famous song about another church-building Thanksgiving dinner, it was a meal “that couldn’t be beat.”

Many hands made light work with plenty to eat for all.

See if you can spot anyone you recognize.

We didn’t know it, but this would be our last Thanksgiving photo together.

None of us dreamed it would be Jeff’s last Thanksgiving. Looking back, my gratitude for having a church family to share with us that day becomes deeper and more luminous.  What a beautiful day that was– and what would I not give now, to have another Thanksgiving exactly like that one? There was nothing flashy or expensive about the day, but no amount of wealth could have bought it for us.

I can pretty much guarantee you that there is something special about where you are today– maybe it’s your health, or the presence of loved ones, or just the contentment that goes along with a day when nothing much seems to happen– but there is almost certainly something that one day will reveal itself to you as a treasure you didn’t fully realize. Today I invite you to join me as we seek to open our eyes, insofar as we can, to the hidden gifts today will bring.

This post was first published seven years ago. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.