FAITH MATTERS Pastor Discovers Double Reason For Thanks

MONTH OF BLESSINGS

By MARK LINDSTROM

Posted: November 28, 2009 at 3:12 a.m.

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I am sitting in a hotel lobby doing what I have always been told to do at this time of year: count my blessings.

While I try to name them one by one throughout the year, this week is set aside to consider the issue intentionally.

Looking at my computer screen, I experience an epiphany of sorts.

I am thankful for the month of November. For one reason, November is the thanks giving month, the time set aside by our nation to give thanks for the many blessings we have received.

Although the holiday is officially a secular one, it has become a spiritual holiday forpeople of faith. Like Christmas and Easter, Thanksgiving has deep significance for Christians. Our thanks giving is not a generic emotion or a patriotic sentimentalism, but an opportunity to give thanks to God for the specific ways he has blessed our lives throughout the year.

We use this moment to“ … name them one by one.” As we offer thanks, we are aware that God’s love, demonstrated most specifically through Christ, provides the ultimate meaning for every other blessing we receive.

November is also National Adoption Month. This is the month when the cause of the orphan is intentionally highlighted. Attention is directed to finding these precious children of God “forever families” where they can be loved and empowered to fulfill their God-given purposes in life.

Millions of children all over the world await the loving embrace of a mother and father. Thousands of potential parents are responding to their cry, internationally and domestically. I am thankful for November.

My epiphany today wasthe realization that these two Novembers converge for me.

One year ago, as I was preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving Day, my wife and I received the call that forever changed our lives: permission to return to Russia to complete an adoption we had begun more than four years before.

We had traveled to Russia that October, met a little boy in an orphanage, fell in love with him and declared our intention to adopt him. Returning to the U.S., we waited a month and a half for an invitation from the Russian government to return to make official what had already been completed in our hearts.

Those were the longest six weeks of our lives, and they felt longer to us than the previous fouryears of hoping and praying for our initial referral.

Thanks to God, and thanks to the possibility of adoption, our son is home and our family is complete. For my wife and me, it is a prayer come true.

I am thankful. Perhaps more thankful than I knew was possible one year ago. Celebrating Thanksgiving has a deeper meaning, as I offer a prayer of thanks to our loving God, while holding the hands of my wife and my little boy.

DR. MARK LINDSTROM IS THE SENIOR PASTOR AT BENTONVILLE CHURCH OF THE NAZARENE. HE IS A GRADUATE OF NAZARENE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN KANSAS CITY, MO., AND ASBURY THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN WILMORE, KY.

Religion, Pages 10 on 11/28/2009

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