Article November 25, 2019 Issue

Buoyed by being grateful

Deb Hensley

It was Thanksgiving Day. I was sitting alone in a church pew feeling sorry for myself. This was the first Thanksgiving I’d spent away from both my kids after being divorced. One of my sons was now in college, and the other had gone off to live with his dad and his dad’s new wife for his last year of high school. The whole situation felt incredibly unjust and wrong. I felt cheated, hurt, and filled with loss. How come “she” gets to be there with “my” kid on Thanksgiving Day, and I don’t? I thought I had exactly nothing to be thankful for.

But I had come to church yearning toward gratitude, so I opened up my heart and tried to listen to the Lesson-Sermon from the Christian Science Quarterly. The hymns helped a lot, as they always do. But it was this arresting story read aloud from the Bible that morning that really got my attention:

Two women came to King Solomon for justice. One woman said, “O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also:… And this woman’s child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom.” The second woman contradicted the first and insisted that the living child was hers. The king’s solution was to call for a sword and instruct his servants to divide the living child in two and give half to each woman. “Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof” (I Kings 3:16–27).

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