Walk into almost any local store this week and you’ll have to walk by a Christmas tree display & such to get to Thanksgiving items you went there for. Excuse me?
Because there isn’t any gift exchanging and egg hunting with baskets full of goodies, the retailers seem to be dissing Thanksgiving and plowing on ahead to a more lucrative holiday. How sad and even pathetic!
Yet it reminds us who the stores are really serving: MONEY. Specifically…your money. They are counting their revenues like Charles Dicken’s character Scrooge would in his counting house…then call you an Ebenezer if you don’t spend a lot on your friends and loved ones.
The purpose of this post is to bring us back to thankfulness…to giving thanks to the Creator who has blessed us in so many ways. Is this your first year growing food God’s way? Wasn’t it a blessing? Even as it gets colder (and rainier in the Pacific NW) those wood chips are a thermal blanket for your soil as they percolate rain water into compost tea and bless the ground under it all.
Here is an excerpt of an email from a friend who has waited months to get wood chips: WOOD CHIPS FINALLY ARRIVED!
Now there is a person who has something to be thankful for! Same happened to me…twice (at least). When I got a free load of chipped dogwood, I had mixed emotions. Yes…I could now start covering the garden in Washington, but they just seemed so benign. They had no smell to them and only seemed to be “just there.” So I shared that with Paul Gautschi and he said: “It’s all good David,” but ended by saying let’s just believe together that the next load is going to be everything you desire (easy to shovel, lots of greens, and smell wonderful).
Sure enough, the next free load was all that (and larger!) I called Paul that day and told him I was standing next to the best pile of cedar wood chips I have ever had…and he was blessed as he remembered our conversation and his speaking LIFE to the situation.
So being thankful is good if we direct that thanks to the worthy recipient…God (our Maker). The Bible tells us in James 1: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”