Remembering To Forget... Thoughts on Thanksgiving

Holiday meals were (let's be honest, still are) often met with joyful anticipation and dread in my family. I read an article this week on the Gospel Coalition site that dealt with the challenging moments and hardships of shared family meals. Especially, ones like Thanksgiving that have so much pressure and significance placed upon them. As the author of the article notes, often we rely on the traditions themselves to bind our tables in unity and love. Yet, that is a lot of pressure to place on a green bean casserole. She offers instead, that we should seek unity in Christ-like forgetfulness. She states,  

"Which is why days like Thanksgiving are not merely calls to remembrance but also calls to forgetfulness—no, not the forgetfulness of lost car keys or misplaced TV remotes, but the intentional forgetting of what has gone before, the setting aside of past offenses, the laying down of our claims to restitution for old wounds. We are called to a forgetful forgiveness of others—the kind our heavenly Father practices toward us—in which we decide not to remember. Though the record of our hurts may never fade from our consciousness, we consciously set it aside. It's a deliberate forgetfulness of the offenses of others and a studied forgetfulness of the sins of our own past—a refusal to let them continue to dictate the course of our decisions and reactions."

Looking back, maybe my family dinners could have used a large helping of remembering to forget. After all, grandma's impassioned appeals for everyone to just get along, never seemed to work. OK, who am I kidding? My Grandma never made the impassioned appeals, she was the troublemaker... ;)

You can read the whole article here.

Whoa!!! How did Google get a picture of my family's Thanksgiving dinner?!?