By Sarah Holik
I think about what I’m thankful for, I enjoy spending time with my family and I love having a few days off, but beyond that I really don’t like Thanksgiving.
I would be happy without the foods most people seem to look forward to at Thanksgiving. Football games are OK but unimportant.
These aren’t the biggest reasons for disliking Thanksgiving, though. The foundation of my aggravation is hearing the same exact story about the pilgrims and the Indians every single year as a child. Being neither a pilgrim nor an Indian, I didn’t really care about the first Thanksgiving. Enough is enough!
Many of my peers express similar sentiments about Baptist heritage, particularly those stories from the last 30 years or so. Struggles and the heartbreaks that didn’t happen to the listeners aren’t really as big a deal as the storytellers would have us believe. People in their 20s and 30s tend not to care what happened to Southern Seminary or how the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship started. “Enough is enough, so stop telling the stories!” Or at least that’s what I hear when I listen to and read many of my peers.
The truth is that I was wrong about the story of the first Thanksgiving and my peers are wrong about the stories they are sick of hearing.
I may not be a pilgrim or an Indian, but I am an American; therefore, the first Thanksgiving is part of my heritage. Today I find myself telling the story of the first Thanksgiving over and over to my 4-year-old preschool class. Children need to know the story so that they understand where we come from, why we do certain things and so that they can tell others.
The same is true of Baptists, regardless of age. We must hear and tell the whole story of the last 400 years — including the last 30 — to understand where we come from, why we do certain things and so that we can tell others.
This year I find myself more thankful and more excited about Thanksgiving than ever before. Maybe it’s because I’m experiencing some of the story for myself. I’ve set out for my own “new world” — adulthood with gainful employment — and despite all my worries, hardships and disappointments, my needs are met. Truthfully, I have abundance.
I’m also thankful for the ways I am experiencing the Baptist story. This week of Thanksgiving, I am confronted with my own Baptist struggles and heartbreaks and yet thankful for where I am.
Recently the Georgia Baptist Convention voted to break ties with Druid Hills Baptist Church, because they have a woman as co-pastor. My heart breaks for the Walkers, who were meaningful parts of my seminary experience, and for Druid Hills, but I’m thankful for the congregation’s bright future.
My heart breaks that the presiding president of the GBC is also my former pastor and remains the pastor of the church where I grew up. But I am immensely thankful that my current pastor affirms women in ministry and chose to stand up with and speak in support of Druid Hills at the convention. In my church family and ministry, I have abundance.
We don’t always like the stories of our heritage, but we don’t get to choose them. The stories are ours, and they happen to us in different ways. We may sometimes feel that enough is enough, but that doesn’t mean these things aren’t important. We must listen. We must tell. Out of our hearing and experiencing comes our thanksgiving.