We're about to enter the season that is often called the time of excitement, the season of miracles. Even the season of wonder. In fact, this Thursday the first miracle will occur. Thursday, families from all over this country will gather together around the table and they'll share in wonderful meals together and the miracle will be they will be able to do that and the phone won't ring. The season of miracles and wonder, the time of Thanksgiving it is, isn't it? Remember the magic words that you always shared with your children and maybe these are the words that your mother shared with you. Remember the magic words? Remember what they were? Please and thank you. I bet our children got tired of hearing that. Every time we shoo them out the door was be good and remember the magic words. That's what Thanksgiving is about, isn't it? Remember to be thankful. And we pass that on to our children by encouraging them to say please and thank you. I can remember when our children were small. They were playing out in the back yard and I was leaning against the fence talking with a neighbor and he said something to me and I didn't hear it because the kids were doing something they weren't supposed to be doing, so I shouted to them: "Would you please stop that? "And then they'd quit and I'd say thank you. And he looked at me and he says, why are you thanking your kids for behaving? They are supposed to do that. I said, I'm trying to practice what I preach." So it's all about trying to create a will of thankfulness. Our morning's scripture point comes from Deuteronomy. How many times do we read that as Christians and all we hear is thou shalt not? We see it as a list of demands that a dictator puts upon his subjects or we see it as a list of guidelines that restrict us, confine us, to where we can't have any fun. Or we look at it as just simply scolding almost upon God's part. But all of that is very far from the truth. Because when we think of the 10 Commandments, we think of them as an entity by themselves and we forget so much about what happened before then. This morning's reading gives us a sample of that. Moses says remember what God has done for us. That's the first part of that speech when he delivers the 10 Commandments. Remember what God has done for us. And so these 10 Commandments are not edicts, but they are ways that God has given us to express our thankfulness, to express our gratitude, because God has first acted and done for us. In fact, that's the formula that I would suggest the 10 Commandments are all about, it's about God's action and our thankfulness equals that praise that is delivered in the Commandments. That happiness, that joy.
And so I would say that today's scripture lesson, instead of creating a will of thankfulness, God has created the 10 Commandments to develop a heart of thankfulness. There is a difference there. A will of thankfulness just means that you have an attitude and a determination. But a heart of thankfulness is something completely different. A heart of thankfulness is filled with joy and celebration and gratitude and it creates a different type of life. It creates a life that's full and rich.
To show you what I mean, I'm going to share with you a story, my story, or our story. You know, this is not the recession we've been through. In a previous life, I used to be a construction worker. If you worked construction in the mid west in the 1980's, you were hungry because the recession at the end of the 70's and going into the 80's didn't really take the construction industry by storm until about mid 80s. The 1980's. And all of a sudden, all construction ceased. See we finished the projects we were doing but nothing got started. And it takes a while to start building again. You have to get the plans, you have to develop the funding and all of that. So for about five years there, we were scratching the dirt to try to find something to do. Our children were little then. Those were tough times for us. I can remember times when I would work three or four weeks for a contractor, then be laid off for three months and then work maybe another three or four weeks and then be laid off again. And we had at that time made a decision as a family that Chris would stay home with the children because we wanted somebody to be home with them and that I would work. And now all that was turned upside down because I couldn't find work. At first we started taking children in for day care, and those children, some of them, we got new children every two weeks. We would have them for two weeks in our home and then when they got paid, they wouldn't show up on Monday to pay us, right? And so we had these children kind of circulating through the house with ours. And then Chris also agreed to work. She said she would go out to work. And so she found a job working in a nursing home as an aide, second shift. And we only had one car. So I would load the babies up in the car this is in the dead of winter I would go warm up the car first to get it nice and warm, then load the babies in the car and take her to work because the nursing home was in a violent part of town. And then at 11 o'clock at night I would have to warm the car up again, load the babies in the car, go pick her up and bring her home. And I did this every day. Then I would get up with her in the morning sometimes, sometimes she would. We would share that because the kids were coming remember the day care and we tried to do what we could and I would pick up odd jobs here and there to try to do whatever we could to scratch because I don't know how unemployment is here in Maryland I have not had the experience of being a recipient of that but I can tell you in Illinois, It ain't worth going. It's terrible. So there was nothing there for us. We were lucky if we could buy a week's worth of groceries with what we got.
The funny story during that time, though, is concerning my wife. My wife grew up with no men in the household. Just her and her mother and her sisters. When she was born, her oldest brother was 18 and in the military. So when we got married, she wasn't used to a man around the house or anything. Anyway, she started working in this nursing home and that evening they came to her and handed her an electric razor and said, here, you need to give all the guys a shave. And she took it and walked out in the hallway and looked at it, said, well, how does this thing work? She messed with it a little bit, pushed this little button and this blade was outside you know. Unbeknownst to her, they were the sideburns trimmer guides. She thought, owe, that's how I use it. So she turned it on and tried to shave them with that, with that sideburn trimmer, and she said, I never saw old men move so fast. She said she couldn't catch them anywhere.
Anyway, that could have been a tough time and we could cry and wine about it and we could be anxious about it again as our country goes back into another recession, but, you know, when I talk about those times with Mandy and with friends, I don't talk about the struggles we had, instead I talk about how there were some blessings in the midst of all of that. I tell them about how the blessing was that that was one of those opportunities when Chris stood up to the plate, so to speak, and went to work. She didn't have to. I didn't beg her to. She volunteered. And even though I knew she was on my side, it was the way she chose to show it, so I could see it and know I wasn't in this alone.
In all those times when I loaded the kids up in the car and picked her up and took her, those were neat times, because that's when my son learned how to say the a,b, cs. We would sit in the car waiting for Chris to come out and we would practice singing those a,b c's and all those other children's songs. And I still remember that to this day.
And then all those other things that went with it, too. The fact that I discovered what it meant to spend the whole evening with only little kids and hunger for adult language. I learned to appreciate her staying home a lot more. And the fact that even though we were scraping to get by, we were together and we had our health and all of that was just wonderful. We spent more time together because we couldn't afford to go out. We couldn't afford to drive anywhere. Gas prices were high then, too. They were up over a dollar a gallon. Can you believe it?
So what I want to suggest for us as Thursday comes, as we have all the worries of our world, let us take a lesson from what God instructs us to do to make our lives rich and full of joy and happiness and that is to remember and be thankful. Remember what God has done and is doing in our lives and then be thankful. It's that time when we can tell those stories. When you sit down to that meal. Don't do it before you eat because nobody is going to listen to you. They will be too hungry, but after you eat, before dessert comes out, you always want that little bit of time to let your thoughts settle, tell the stories of thankfulness. Share the stories about how you've been blessed in your life. Remember, and be thankful. And it will be a joyous day. Because I know God will honor it and bless you for it. God be with you, amen.