The Thanksgiving holidays aren’t quite what they used to be, for our family at least.

There was a time when Thanksgiving was a day for our extended family to get together to feast and enjoy each other’s company. We weren’t a particularly big group. Unlike some families I know, who might host thirty to fifty people, our gatherings were never more than fifteen—and often, that included some friends who had nowhere else to go. But none of us lived in large houses either, so even a dozen made for quite a crowd in any of our homes.

My job, typically, was to roast the turkey, or whatever protein we decided to bring that year. That often made us late to the gathering, since I had to babysit the bird, and could never pinpoint when it would get to just the right temperature. Then I’d have to pack it for transport and hope that it wouldn’t either get cold or overcook on its own. Even with all that, I could expect that every year someone would tell me it was the best turkey they’d ever had. I suspect that their praise was less about the turkey in front of them, and more about the dry and unpleasant thing they expected turkey to be.

Either that, or it was a way of confirming that no one else wanted the job.

But those days are gone now, becoming nothing more than nostalgic memories. My father passed away in 2011, the year I started this blog. Later, after graduate school, my son and his wife moved out of state to take a job. Then my sister and her family moved across the country during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. At the end of that trying year, my mother died of COVID-related complications. And just this past year, my sister died unexpectedly after a long battle with her own health challenges. This is the first Thanksgiving holiday, therefore, in which I’m deeply conscious of being the last man standing from the family of four in which I grew up. There will never be another big Thanksgiving get-together. For the last few years, and for who knows how many years going forward, it’s just me, my wife, and our daughter, who still lives nearby.

Don’t get me wrong: we make a great day of it. Typically, we set ourselves some kind of creative cooking competition, where each of us has to make a dish that follows an agreed-upon theme. And we play games, another family tradition. Again, it’s a good day, and I enjoy it. It’s just not the same thing, and for me, there’s a lingering wistfulness about it.

Nevertheless, I’m grateful.

Things change. Centuries before Christ, Plato credited the Greek philosopher Heraclitus with using the image of a river as a metaphor for change: you can’t step into the same river twice, because the water you stepped into the first time has moved on. But that doesn’t mean that everything changes or that everything is in a constant state of flux, nor that everything must change at the same rate. The riverbed changes, for example, but slowly; the topography of the riverbank changes more slowly still. There is constancy amidst the change.

And biblically speaking, the constant upon which we depend is the character of God. This is why the apostle Paul, as he wraps us a letter to the Thessalonian church, can say these well-known words:

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. (1 Thess 5:16-18, NIV)

We might not be thankful for every circumstance; some things have changed that I wish hadn’t. But we can give thanks no matter what the circumstances, as Paul himself was able to do even though he suffered for the gospel in ways that we can hardly imagine. He tells the Thessalonians that God is a God of peace, by which he probably means shalom, or wholeness; he tells them that God is faithful (1 Thess 5:23-24). This is who God has always been, who God will always be. This is the reason for our gratitude.

Do you enjoy your family gatherings? Be grateful. Have your gatherings changed or vanished? Be grateful. Are your gatherings tense, marred by the anxious expectation that Uncle Harry is going to get into another argument with Cousin Myrtle about politics? Even then, you can still be grateful…if the one to whom and for whom you are grateful is the eternal and unchanging God.

And oh, by the way, if you’re thankful for someone in your family, tell them, and tell them why.

May your Thanksgiving Day be blessed.