“So where are you taking us?” Linda asked coyly. Halden and his fiancée, Laurie insisted that we keep the night of Sept. 12 free.
“We are taking you out,” they said. “Don’t ask where to or what for.”
A few days after getting the instructions from Halden and Laurie, an inadvertent comment from Chelsea and her new husband, Mike that they might be up from the coast that same weekend got Linda and me to thinking. Our 39th wedding anniversary kind of got lost in the planning and pulling off of Chelsea and Mike’s recent wedding. They had been married on the same day as our anniversary, just a few weeks before.
“Must be the kids are going to take us out to 100 Mile House for a little surprise anniversary dinner,” Linda said.
“I don’t care, as long as I am not paying,” I said.
And so at the appointed hour on the prescribed night, Halden and Laurie cleaned out the van, loaded us in and off we went to our wedding anniversary dinner. I was even wearing a clean T-shirt. It’s about a 45-minute drive to the hamlet of 100 Mile House from our place, so I settled in for a nice evening drive with someone else doing the driving for a change. Fifteen minutes into it, we drove through the highway settlement of Lac La Hache.
“I wonder what’s going on at the old log community hall,” Linda said, as we drove through Lac La Hache. “Sure are an awful lot of cars in the parking lot.”
“Yeah,” I said, just as Halden swerved quickly into the parking lot. “And I recognize every one of them.”
Halden herded us towards the door as we harangued him about what was going on. He stuffed us in through the door into the darkened hall and suddenly the lights came on to the tune of, “Surprise! Happy 20th anniversary.”
I was just about to stand forth and impatiently correct the huge crowd gathered before us: It was not our 20th anniversary; it was our 39th anniversary. If you are going to go to the trouble to gather such a huge crowd to celebrate it, at least get the number right. Then I remembered. It was our 20th anniversary, sort of. It had been 20 years ago that summer that Linda and our young boys Halden and Davin had moved north from the Presbytery of Westminster under appointment of the Life and Mission Agency to begin our dream of an interdenominational rural house church mission in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region of B.C. The huge crowd that gathered were the people who had been touched by those 20 years of mission work.
It was an amazing party, a real thanksgiving feast. There was great music, great food, wonderful speeches and a knock your socks off DVD presentation that our partner in mission, Shannon Bell-Wyminga had put together. It was all by way of saying thank you to Linda and I for the past 20 years of vision, work and mission. I was moved to tears a number of times. Linda and I were both deeply touched by the thanks we were given. It was a night of tender feelings and wonderful memories. But most of all, it was a night of inspiration and empowerment. Linda and I came away with a new sense of being loved and appreciated that inspired us and empowered us to begin the next years, however many there would be, with a new energy, excitement and commitment.
“If only the people knew what they have done to us,” I said to Linda as we drove home late that night and we were discussing what we were feeling after the evening of gratitude.
“I guess they will find out,” said Linda. “Maybe we should have warned everyone to lace up their running shoes. We’re off to the mission races with renewed power and energy.”
The power of giving thanks, of showing gratitude; it is amazing and yet it strikes me that we are so miserly at doing it in our culture, many times even in our churches. I suppose one could wag the finger and lecture on how we in society and in the church need to change and become generous in expressing gratitude to one another. But that is not the main lesson I took away from our thanksgiving party. What I took away was, “If this is how being freely and fully thanked has dramatically affected me tonight, how does it affect God?”
As I reflect on this question it strikes me that the Bible really doesn’t have much to say about how thanking God affects God. Jesus is said to be the full reflection or image of God in the flesh and as such, in him we see God. There are several times when Jesus is shown gratitude in the gospels. It does seem to deeply touch him that one of the 10 lepers actually returned to thank him for the healing. And then there is the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, which seems to me to be a pretty powerful expression of gratitude, especially offered the way it was, before Jesus did anything. Jesus actually seems to forgive her sins in response to her thanksgiving. Was Jesus so affected by the deep expression of gratitude given by the woman that it inspired him to act, perhaps even empowered him to act and forgive?
Three of the most interesting stories in scripture that may help the most in getting at the answer to this question — How does the free and full thanking of God affect God? — has to do with Jesus giving thanks to the Father. At the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, which appears in all four gospels, the only prayer that Jesus offers is a prayer of thanksgiving to his Father (Mark 6:41). The only prayer that Jesus offers a couple of chapters later at the miracle of the feeding of the 4,000 is a prayer of thanksgiving to his Father (Mark 8:6). And at the tomb and the miracle of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the only prayer that Jesus offers is a prayer of thanksgiving to his Father (John 11:41). I have no idea how God felt at those times of being freely and fully thanked by the Son, but I am suitably impressed with how it affected God. The miracles are evidence of that. I don’t know if it is appropriate to say God was empowered by the giving of thanks to the point of performing the miracles or if it is appropriate to say that the giving of thanks inspired God. I am convinced, however, that there is a divine power inherent in giving thanks to God, so much so that this recent revelation to me has radically changed my prayer life. The content of my prayers now seem to be much less of the type of worrying in front of God and much more prayers of freely and fully thanking God, even before God does anything, maybe even if God does nothing at all.
