Last Thursday, November 28th, was Thanksgiving. A day I have known forever to be a day of spending time with beloved friends and family while sharing in a delightful meal and giving thanks to the Lord for His abundant blessings, faithfulness, generosity, and goodness. This would have been the first year that I didn’t have that-- but thankfully, that was not the case. In fact, my Thanksgiving this year was completely overflowing with each of those things previously listed: precious friends and family, lots of food, and ceaseless praise to my incredible Savior.
But let me give a bit of context… For those of you who don’t know, I moved to Honduras, Central America a couple of months ago to marry the love of my life and now together, to go into full-time ministry. During all the work with our wedding (which was November 19th), we were overwhelmingly blessed by support and help from the people here in La Venta (the village where I now live). My husband, Mario, has lived in La Venta his whole life and therefore has a solid community with his family and friends here, and they have been so wonderful to me and have invited me in as well. Thanks to this community of people, we had so much help in every detail of our wedding and so much support through it all; it was made a truly special day. Because of all of these wonderful people blessing us so much in different ways, Mario and I wanted to celebrate them and thank them for everything they did for us. Originally we were thinking just a normal dinner or something low-key, but then when I realized that Thanksgiving was just around the corner, I decided that would be the best way to do it-- a huge Thanksgiving dinner party to thank everyone involved with the wedding preparations.
Let me just say that I don’t often think things through completely. When it comes to an overall idea, I’ll jump right in and think about the details later. That’s definitely how this happened too. Mario and I were still on our honeymoon when we decided to host Thanksgiving dinner, so we were still in the city and still had the rental car, which made for an easy grocery run. But once we were back home in La Venta, with no car anymore and 45 minutes from the city (which would be a lot longer using public transportation), there were lots of little things I was realizing that I hadn’t considered when making the last minute grocery list while still in the city, and here in La Venta, there are no real grocery stores, which made making the meal a bit more complicated. Plus, almost every single dish that I made, I had never made before. The turkey, which was probably about 20 pounds or more, was especially daunting. And let’s just say that my kitchen is not exactly designed for making large amounts of food all at once, nor is my oven. And my house isn’t really designed for hosting large amounts of people. But that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? Not letting things like that stop us from pursuing fellowship and sharing with others.
So we went for it. We invited the 20 people over for our dinner celebration and put in our best efforts to make it an evening to remember. Mario worked outside in the yard, “mowing” (with a machete) and cleaning the garden. Thankfully he has a “greener thumb” than I do! While he was doing that work, I was inside making the food. My little oven did the job as well as it could, but it was slow going and made for a very long day on Wednesday, then the entire day on Thursday was dedicated to the turkey and to cleaning the house and setting up. The evening was well worth the effort. In our little yard we set up the tables and chairs and, thankfully, didn’t have any issues with rain. Once everyone arrived, we prayed over the food and, with the help of some of the ladies, we dished up all the food onto our high quality paper plates with plastic cutlery and filled the plastic cups with Coca-Cola (in true Honduran fashion) and enjoyed laughter and conversation over dinner and dessert. Followed by eating, we had a time of worship with Mario’s acoustic guitar in our tiny living room. Moments like that are precious to me. Slowly, our guests said their goodnights and we exchanged hugs and kisses as they left. A fairly easy clean-up afterward followed by rather collapsing into bed with a thankful, overflowing heart. It was a rich time and all the glory to God for that. Without Him, I would’ve felt far too overwhelmed and given up after the first 5 minutes of imagining everything that needed to be done, because yes indeed, it was a rather overwhelming thing to tackle. But with Him, the food was multiplied and fed everyone. With Him, the gas didn’t run out in my stove. With Him, we had everything we needed. With Him, I was able to let go of expectations, specifically expectations of myself, and just enjoy the process. And with Him, I get to dream about more evenings like this one. May they always be focused on Him and His goodness.
It’s easy to list the things I’m thankful for, as there are many. I’m thankful for my new life here in Honduras; for my new community of kind, generous, sincere people; for the joyful, laughter-filled, wonderful man I get to call my husband; for my abundantly good Father that provides for me and allows me to worship Him with my brothers and sisters in Christ. He is so very good. How is God blessing you? What are you thankful for?
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