NOW THANK WE ALL OUR GOD (Thanksgiving Fare, regurgitated)

For Thanksgiving, I am reposting this from a few years ago.

One of the most painful aspects of ministry to the elderly residents of our Christian assisted living facility was the inevitability of death. And it was on those occasions that my staff often participated in sharing their feelings of loss and their fond memories. I had come to realize that, for my employees, it was a ministry of love. And their ministry was reciprocal; many of the folks we served had made immeasurable impacts on the lives of those who were serving them.

Over the course of my seventeen years serving the residents, there were many times when the holidays had been especially hard; those seemed to be the times when we lost an unusual number of long-time residents.

In my fifteenth year, we lost one of our residents on Thanksgiving Day. She had gone out with her daughters for a family Thanksgiving dinner. Late in the afternoon she began to feel nauseous and complained of stomach and back pains. They took her to the emergency room at the hospital where she was diagnosed with flu symptoms and discharged back to our care by early evening. My staff monitored her every thirty minutes through the evening.

About 12:45 AM they found her unresponsive and called 911.  By the time I arrived the paramedics had already pronounced her "dead on arrival." I called her pastor and the two of us spent the next few hours comforting and praying with her daughter until the funeral home reps arrived to remove her mother.

Through the years, our resident pastor kept very busy conducting about 30-40 funerals a year. One year, he had seven services in one week. That certainly takes an emotional toll on residents and staff alike. Those are always hard days for caretakers as, typically, the death rate rises significantly following Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

As emotionally difficult as those times were, I am aware that others have experienced far more in terms of loss.  In 1636 there was a pastor who buried 5,000 of his parishioners in a single year. That averaged about fifteen a day and it happened during the Thirty Years War, one of history’s costliest in terms of casualties, epidemics, and economic devastation. He endured some of the worst conditions and experiences that life could dish out.

His name was Martin Rinkert and in the middle of that terrible time of incredible loss, he wrote a table grace, for his children, that has come to be one of our most loved thanksgiving hymns:

Now thank we all our God With hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, In whom His world rejoices;

Who from our mothers' arms Hath blessed us on our way

With countless gifts of love, And still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God Through all our life be near us,

With ever joyful hearts And blessed peace to cheer us;

And keep us in His grace, And guide us when perplexed,

And free us from all ills In this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God The Father now be given,

The Son, and Him who reigns With them in highest Heaven,

The One eternal God, Whom earth and Heaven adore;

For thus it was, is now, And shall be evermore.

One contemporary pastor, Joel Gregory, referring to Martin Rinkert as "The Unlikely Thanker" asked, “If I'd spent the year holding 5,000 funerals for the people I served, could I write a song of thanksgiving for my children?”

It is interesting to note that many people who, seemingly, have the least to thank God for are the very ones who thank Him the most.