Thanksgiving 2024 Reflection: Full Circle Thankfulness

Canadian Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Here in southern Alberta the larches and the Rocky Mountains are loudly and beautifully pointing us to their Maker and ours. This is a significant thanksgiving for me because on October 13th, Thanksgiving Sunday, I will be preaching at Awaken Church in Newmarket, Ontario. This is the church where I began my ministry back in February of 2012 when it was still named Catch The Fire Newmarket. I was only 20 years old at that time. I am now 33 years old, and it seems that God has brought me full circle. It has been quite the 13 years, to say the least. As some of you already know, I stepped down from my role as Youth Pastor at Catch The Fire Newmarket in 2013 because I had become too mentally ill to function let alone work. I then proceeded to spend the rest of my 20s, so around 9 years, very mentally ill and in deep suffering on an almost daily basis. But nevertheless, here I am at 33, far more mentally and spiritually well and whole than I even knew was possible. Herein lies the reason for the title of this blog post - full circle thankfulness. 

Charismatic theology, for all its many strengths, such as its focus on God’s healing and saving intervention in our lives, tends to under-emphasize the scope and depth of human suffering that continues prior to the return of Christ, even in faithful followers of Christ. Suffering is de-normalized in the Christian life when it should really be normalized and expected. What do we do theologically with the fact that what was probably supposed to be my most joy-filled and healthy decade, my 20s, was unimaginably painful? And what are we to do with the state of our world prior to the return of our Lord? The Israeli hostage brutally ripped from his family, the Palestinian child wounded and starving, the multitudes of people displaced and facing famine in Sudan, the ravaged Ukrainian villages whose inhabitants will never be the same again? For many non-Christians, this is the key reason why faith in an all-powerful and all-good God is inconceivable. In the face of severe human suffering, we need a fuller, stronger, more biblical theology that draws from the thousands of years of Christian and Jewish traditional interpretation of the holy Scriptures. 

For my part, as I look back on the 13 intervening years since I last preached at Catch The Fire Newmarket, I feel a keen sense of appreciation for God’s sovereignty and the thankfulness that it produces in us when we trust in him. As many of you know, I am studying John Calvin in my PhD, specifically how he interprets Paul’s letters. I have a great appreciation for Calvin and the Reformed tradition (otherwise I wouldn’t be studying him for five years of my life!). I both admire some aspects of Calvin’s understanding of God’s sovereignty and diverge from other parts of it. I do not hold to a deterministic view of divine sovereignty, where everything that happens can be traced ultimately back to the divine will. I do not think God initially intended for me to have to suffer for an entire decade of my life. I also do not think God wanted that Israeli hostage ripped from his family, or the suffering of the Palestinian child, or the famine in Sudan, or the umpteen tragedies that the people reading this post have had to endure in this life so far. And yet, in one very important respect I am led to drink deeply from Calvin’s theological emphasis on the absolute goodness and trustworthiness of God even in the face of the mysteries of why things are the way they are. My personal suffering of the last 13 years does not compare in even the minutest way to the other tragedies I have mentioned in this post. And yet even as I look at them and my own suffering, somehow I am still draw by the power of the Holy Spirit, the holy Scriptures, and the witness of Christian and Jewish people down through the centuries to believe that one day God will put all things right. One day the widow, the orphan and the foreigner will have justice, one day the proud oppressors will be cast down to the ground by the divine hand, meanwhile that very same hand will lift the needy up from the ash heap (see Mary’s prophetic song in Luke 1:46-56, traditionally called ‘The Magnificat’). One day the taste of shalom (all things being as they should be) that humanity glimpsed in the Garden will be perfected in the new heavens and the new earth. 

But does this faith cheapen, or in some way dismiss the horrendous suffering taking place on this planet? Is it an appropriate response to all this? Shouldn’t we point the finger at God? After the last 13 years and reading the news today, I can truly, genuinely empathize with those who take this path. But I have survived the last 13 years and am now flourishing because I chose to take a different path, first trodden by Abraham, then Moses and Miriam, then Deborah, then Jesus Himself and his profound person of a mother, then the fathers and rabbis of the 2nd-6th centuries, down to people like Theresa of Avila and Catherine Booth and Phoebe Palmer, and Billy Graham and Tim Keller. 

And then there is us, living in the 21st century, a century with just as much suffering tempting us to take the path away from God, rather than towards him. For my part, I am now convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the same God who cared for me when I was so desperately ill when I stepped down from my position at Catch The Fire Newmarket in 2013 is the same God who has carried me through it all and brought me back to the same church in 2024 to preach a message of thankfulness and trust in Him. Our job is not to save ourselves or to understand everything completely. Our job is to not give up. The Greek word ὑπομονὴ is usually translated ‘endurance’. This facet of Christian discipleship is not given nearly enough attention today, in my opinion. Our main task as Christians in the face of all this is to never give up, even when everything around us screams ‘God is not great’, as Christopher Hitchens famously entitled one of his books. And as we refuse to give up, we must allow our trust in Jesus to creatively generate inside us tireless efforts for justice, healing and reconciliation (see Galatians 5:6 and Micah 6:8). Christian ὑπομονὴ has come too far and seen God’s goodness and trustworthiness too many times to turn back now. I am personally at the point now where I will simply never give up. Come what may, I am His and He is mine. I have made my decision. So, whatever you are going through, my gentle encouragement to you is to not give up believing. One day, whether we see it in this life or only in the next, God will put all things right for us as individuals and for our hurting and broken world. 

I leave you with Jude’s magnificent benediction: “To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen” (Jude 1:24-25, NIV).

Happy Thanksgiving from Claire and me.