The Bitter & the Sweet

Wow. We're still stuffed from Thanksgiving. Hope those of you who are Americans had a wonderful Thanksgiving this past week.

A lot of people wonder how we celebrate Thanksgiving out here in the sticks. For us, Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that has seeped into our pores since childhood, & it feels like there's sort of a "right way" to celebrate it.

You know: Turkey. Stuffing. Gravy. Mashed potatoes. Green bean casserole. Pumpkin pie. Etc, etc, etc.

One of the things I'm thankful for at this time of year is that, with a little planning, we're still able to have most of those things most years. When we were in Manila in October, we picked up a turkey (Butterball!!) to bring home to our freezer until Thanksgiving. My husband was in Manila for meetings last week, so I sent him with a list of things to buy - we actually had real celery in our stuffing this year!

Here's a pic of a few of our little pilgrims:

And here's a picture of the spread:

Not too shabby, huh?

We were blessed to celebrate with teammates who have become our family out here in the Philippines. We had Americans who were reliving their own holiday traditions, and Filipinos who have graciously adjusted to ours. It was an awesome day.

But that's not the whole story.

Because something else happened last week that made us feel a lot more homesick than missing our families on Thanksgiving. People we love, who are our family members back in the USA, experienced a tragedy last week. I'm not going to go into specifics, because it's not my story to share, but it's the kind of gut-wrenching, heart-breaking stuff that will change these precious people for good. It's not the kind of thing they'll get over; it's the kind of thing they are living through.

And we weren't there.

Not there to weep with them. Not there to pray with them. Not there to wrap our arms around them and grieve silently because there are no words. These are the times when we most feel our distance from home & family - when we can't give to the ones we love in the way we want to.

But maybe those are the key words: in the way we want to. We still gave: we prayed, we sent our love, we asked about their well-being via family members. We just couldn't give in exactly the way we would have liked to. We had to fall back on what God desires for our family - to be right where we are, in the Philippines, giving thanks for His abundance & His tenderness on a bittersweet Thanksgiving.