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:

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