Where it All Ends

This past week was Thanksgiving. I am sure we all spent valued time with loved ones, eating too much, looking at ads, and making Christmas plans. Thanksgiving is an appropriate holiday for Americans to celebrate because, well…we have so much to be thankful for. The mere possibility that we can gather with our friends and families as free men and women, spending time as we choose, worshipping, eating, sleeping, is reason enough to be eternally grateful.

I also have a private Thanksgiving that I am lucky enough to be able to celebrate weekly. It occurs right after our church service at Antioch Christian Church is completed. The music dies down, people start to speak to each other, some making plans for lunch, and there is a loud rumble from all the chairs in the auditorium being stacked and moved.

It is at this moment that I escape into the side hallway. The silence I encounter is always a shock as it is a stark contrast to what I leave behind. As people talk and make their way to the exits, I am alone. I walk slowly down the hallway to the left, turning right at the fist door. As I approach the next door on my left, I silently give thanks to God, creator of the entire universe, for the tiny gift he is about to give me personally. I take the first left.

There I will find my daughter, Alex. Sometimes she is waiting for me, searching the faces of parents picking up their own children. Sometimes she is across the room playing with a toy that has held her interest. In either case, when her eyes meet mine, her eyebrows raise, her hands go in the air and she exclaims, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” It is always the high point of my week, and to be honest, sometimes the sole motivation for attending that week’s service. I’m sure God is aware of that. He wants to get me in that building one way or another and he knows EXACTLY how to do it.

As I bend down to pick up the little girl with the bow in her hair that is heading my way in a dead run, I silently say my weekly prayer.

“Thanks.”