Take a moment and imagine what your Thanksgiving table might look like, if you took Jesus's words literally.
I'm serious.
Picture your table groaning with food, the cute placemats that your kids make and the china you pull out once a year. Now replace one familiar chair with a wheelchair. Imagine a person with serious disability sitting there between Aunt Donna and Cousin Mark; one of them will need to help him throughout the meal. Finally there is your husband, leading in from the living room a lady, bent and blind. That is the Thanksgiving Jesus had in mind.
With Thanksgiving around the corner, kids are making turkeys traced from their fingers and scribbling their blessings on it. Our whole country for a few short weeks focuses on the reasons we have to be thankful. As parents we want more for our kids then a week’s worth of gratitude. We want them to understand and be grateful everyday for all the blessings in their lives. But how? 
For November, Helene and I wanted to do a few weeks on praise and Thanksgiving. When I was thinking of what to write, I wanted to go beyond thanking God for our blessings (a good thing to do) and speak about being thankful for our trials (a hard thing to do). 
What dishes are you pulling out for Thanksgiving? When I lived in America we had a couple of fancy serving platters, a ceramic dish or two just the right size for sweet potato casserole, and a giant roaster that were only pulled out for holidays. Back then I had ordinary dishes too. Chipped and cracked, they were familiar and useful. There was one more kind: a big ceramic bowl in the bathroom that I should have cleaned more often than I did. 