Gratitude and Grief (again): Thanksgiving 2025 edition

Gratitude and grief were key words for us over the past few years, starting with my near-death accident and moving through dwindling team and stolen resources and personal betrayals. And we’ve certainly come back to them in 2025 which began with a lightening bolt of stage IV cancer and complete upheaval of home and work and life and future. The pairing insists that the world is complex, that even in times of shaking loss, if we pay attention, we will see reasons to be thankful. The fingerprints of divine mercy grace even the scorched waste of a rough year. As we have grieved, we have gratefully celebrated too.

   

November winds down into the American national holiday of Thanksgiving, and the paradoxical pairing pins the complexity of gratitude and grief in place once again. Gratitude is the essence of this holiday: for survival, for feasting with friends and family, for finding our place in a story that hints at redemption in spite of darkening days. For the unfathomable list of things tangible and intangible provided from outside in. We humanly need the communal pause to focus on that providence. Being thankful is not a time for gloating. Being thankful acknowledges the many ways our days are better than they could be. Thanks becomes both humbling and directional, a posture that notices the thousandfold bounty of access to much we did nothing to earn or deserve. In 2025 we don’t have to invent penicillin or electricity; vaccines and public resources have smoothed all our paths. Many of us thank parents, or elders, or teachers, or colleagues, as well as thanking God. It is a national moment to breathe in the changing season, to taste the pleasure of food and drink, to lean into the relational girding of our neighborhoods. To look beyond ourselves.

But even the week of Thanksgiving, gratitude is not a platitude that coats a glossy veneer over troubles. We gather around tables spread in metaphorical wildernesses. Attending to reality requires the dual discipline of noticing reasons to be thankful, and reasons to mourn. Both have a direction towards family, community, and God. Psalms of lament and psalms of thanksgiving, both/and, give voice to the tangible truths.

So this Thanksgiving, join us in thanking God that Scott’s cancer treatment is actively extending his life. (And thanks for all the comments on his birthday post below!) I am writing this on the house-on-the-rock porch in Sago, WV, where a rain-swollen river churns by and acres of woods embody the beauty of death renewing life, leaf color fading as leaf-fall returns richness to the soil, thankful for the wild wonder of this old farm. Two of our kids will travel to California to bolster one grandmother’s holiday, two will join their loved ones’ families, and we will be hosted by my sister and nephews and mother, thankful for all these family networks. Every day we miss our Africa life, but we also have ongoing reasons to be thankful. New doctors trained in multiple residencies and medical schools multiplying healing. A failed rebellion in our old home manipulated young people and cost some their lives this past month, but that accentuates the goodness of hundreds of others a few miles away daily grounded in Gospel truth and nourishing safety at CSB, as the school year draws to a peaceful close. Our photographer in Fort Portal has gathered a cadre of others to create art and tell stories that the world needs to hear, and just joined a sister team to bless a country in our Area with much suffering and few believers. Thousands of blind people have had sight restored as the Eye Love Africa project trains and provides cataract surgery. Two places that have suffered horrific violence, this year and for decades, had Gospel-hope incarnation visits from our teams, and a third has our team back making homes in spite of temporary evacuations. Hundreds and hundreds of people heard Bible stories that they could relate to and ponder the nature of God’s love and work in their immediate worlds. On every team, we are the bridge generation to African saints with bigger hearts and minds. SO MUCH to be thankful for, SO MUCH that God continues to do through the 80 workers we left behind, so grateful to maintain a thread of connection to all this work. 

And this Thanksgiving, join us in holding onto the paradox of both gratitude and grief. The God whose mercy allowed all the above is not offended by our crying out as we encounter the massive sorrows that persist. Wars have not ceased, and from Sudan to Congo to Gaza to Ukraine we lament the greed and fear that preclude peace. Hunger has not ceased, and in every part of our Area we ask God to provide more funding and food for those who suffer. Sickness has not ceased, so we call out for God to spare the lives of people we know and love, and the many more that are known to God and not to us, to protect women in labor and vulnerable newborns and frail elderly and everyone on the margins. 2025 has been a shocking year to be back in America where we are more tuned into the news, to pay attention to the abundance of injustices here and everywhere, of punishment without due process, of sexual harm to children, of mass shootings, of resource concentration to serve the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest, of rescinding protection and hospitality to the stranger . . . we lament all this, and the unseen truth that our hearts need new priorites in Jesus.

At your Thanksgiving table this week, we send our wishes that you embrace the discipline of searching carefully for traces of God’s goodness to stir your thankfulness, and that you unabashedly mingle those thanks with weeping over the world’s woes.

Jesus wept for Jerusalem on the way to his final passover feast with his closest friends. May we all make room in our hearts for complex realities.

Thankful for a tractor and trees, getting ready for winter

Thankful for this farm and the family that settled in Sago

And pray for us to be thankful for countless zoom calls (this is how we appear in our little office, calling Africa)

PS if you read this far . . . here is an ablum of songs about the Table that is appropriate to this week, listen as you cook and serve, or if that doesn't work, search Spotify for Table Songs by Porter's Gate.  

He shall be like a tree: Happy Birthday to Scott

 The most important person in my life is turning 65 on Wednesday. First of all I am thankful he’s reaching that milestone. As we grew up, “65” was considered the legitimate end of a working life, the transition point to retirement, much like 18 was the line between child and adult. Starting this 2025 year with a new diagnosis of Stage IV cancer made the birthday an aspirational milestone. And he hadn’t exactly taken the “safe” route for the 64 years prior either, working front-line in two different Ebola epidemics, riding a tank into a war zone to bring aid, gritting out diseases and injuries far from the centers of care, or just the most dangerous reality of decades on high-mortality roads. So today we celebrate not just survival, but the person formed by it. And whether or not you read my thoughts, please feel free to open the comments and leave your name with a word or sentence of witness to who Scott has been so far to you.

65 finds us uprooted from the house where we raised our family and spent 23 of our 38 years of marriage (Bundibugyo, the other 15 were Chicago/Baltimore for training, and a long stretch in Kenya), and falling back on the farm inherited from my family. So the transition from the primary learning/working years to the final stretch of life is a threshold not just of time, but of place. God often moves in those liminal zones to get our attention. This year He’s certainly grabbed ours. Not a day goes by that I don’t affirm that I’d rather be in the whirlwind of uncertainty (Stage IV sounds final, but so is life) with Scott than anywhere else without him.

Birthdays and diagnoses leave us pondering: love is stronger than death, AND death’s limiting inevitability is God’s chosen context to refine our souls. So a birthday tribute to Scott is called for. I once wrote a whole retreat on the image of the tree, and this week our Burundi team is basing their retreat on a Tim Keller sermon on Psalm 1 we listened to, plus it’s peak Fall and we’re surrounded by acres of forest. So some thoughts about Scott, my tree, from my heart today.

Stable roots: Scott is dependably present and not easily blown down. He anchors our family and our Area in his trustworthiness. None of us wonder if he’ll abandon his people or his reality. Those roots have spent a lifetime burrowing into the Rock of Ages, holding and being held. We all count on him to do what he says, and to operate out of truth and service. We know he’s choosing what is good for us, not what is easiest for him. We can lean on him, and we do. I wanted to be supporting him this year, but he’s had to carry me through two broken arms. Which he does, for many, without fanfare and without complaining, a stable presence.

Curious branches: Scott’s roots and branches fork and extend continuously: by research, data, reading, talking, listening, engaging. One way he loves his kids is by going to great lengths to understand what they are interested in, to keep up with it, to try. He has always been an athlete, but an American football/baseball/swimming/track star who then embraced soccer, rugby, racing, climbing, and marksmanship as his kids’ and community’s passions led him there. He has always been a stellar student, but he doesn’t rest on laurels for any new problem. He finds the tools and expertise to address new issues in new ways. He loves to work with his hands, to mend, to create, often with a YouTube video teaching him how.

StrOng trunk: One of the hardest challenges of cancer is the severe impact of treatment on core body capacity. Scott has always been someone who can do hard physical labor, and who enjoys strenuous exercise. Some men abandon treatment for these impacts, which is a legitimate metric of accepting a shorter life but opting for a quality important to them. It is difficult to choose the uncertain forward arc of physically diminished but longer days. He has done that for us, and we are deeply grateful for the soul strength that grows paradoxically by limits and suffering.

Tranquil shade: Scott is a person other people like to be around. He has solid friends from every phase of his life. We rest in his leafy shade, because he’s inviting and communal, he does not horde, he welcomes. He hasn’t based his life on pruning back inefficiency to produce wealth. He’s a family medicine doctor, the path of lower prestige but broader capacity. He’s willing to stretch out his arms further to protect more.

Tactical fruit/seed: The Tim Keller sermon on Psalm 1 points out that fruit is seasonal. Our biologic and our Ugandan “fostered” kids are fruit that will have their own seasons, as will the mothers and babies with HIV, the women saved by timely C-sections, the many hundreds of students nurtured by a school whose mentorship and finances he has long carried, team leaders and members in Serge which have grown from a handful to a crowd in his years. Working remotely now feels a little more pine-coney to us, not spectacular fleshy mangoes as fruit but tiny dry potential seeds. 65 years is not long enough to know all the hidden good that Scott has brought to this world, and that’s as it should be. His part is to be rooted, branching, strong, inviting, productive … but earthbound and time bound views are partial. Faith rests on an outside perspective that will make sense of even prostate cancer.

Celebrate 65 years of Scott by leaving a comment, or saying a prayer. I'm selfishly asking for many more.

All Hallow's . . on saints, eves, death, and leaves

 Death, the universal experience least discussed. A metric of development might be how adeptly the average person in the area can avoid this reality. In our 30+ years in Africa we went to more burials in a year than Americans attend in a lifetime. The first one or two thousand years of the church for most of the world could not ignore death, and so this weekend in the church's calendar is a time to "memento mori", remember death, in All Hallow's Eve (Halloween), All Hallow's (Saint's) Day, and All Soul's Day. I suspect the timing was set in the Northern Hemisphere by Fall, the season of fading light and dropping leaves. In 2025, we are once again in Fall, and once more face-to-face with death. 

A stage IV metastatic cancer dispels the illusion of living indefinitely. And yet the treatment gives a potentially substantial stretch of road ahead, suffering from the hard medicines and costly commitment but walking on through beauty and joy too. Which is true of life always, just more obvious for us. In my Wendell Berry novel last night I read the main character (Jayber Crow) describe his life as "hoping for good, reconciled to the bad, welcoming the little unexpected happiness that came." Amen. 

The depth of this holiday stretch is the communal nature of the recognition. We are part of a cloud of witnesses (Heb 12), a long parade of saints through time, whose lives upon this earth we recognize and celebrate. We are not alone, even in, maybe especially in, our hardest times. We recognize our belonging, and we garner the wisdom of people who have followed this path through the ages. No trick-or-treaters came to our door last night (so we had to eat a snickers ourself) but three different neighbors / church friends stopped us as we walked down our road yesterday to greet and chat. We miss living intimately with family, team, and village life. But we are not alone even now. (A Bundi favorite song we played and sang: For All the Saints. Exactly this).

Suffering and death, per 1 Corinthians 15, are also "thin spaces" between the seen and unseen world. As such, they are opportunities to recognise the "supernatural", the forces that we relegate to fantasy or horror movies but actually experience in our lives. Suffering is the path, and death is the doorway, and both get our attention when we are distracted by sex, money, power, and all the palpable principalities of this world. They realign our grasp of what matters. 

And lastly, both suffering and death have been redeemed. Death was our final enemy, but Jesus' resurrection turned it into a calling home. I love the old hymns in our country church that compare dying to being called in for supper. Perhaps the best seasonal Halloween passage is Ezekiel 37, where dry bones scattered across the wilderness are breathed to rattle to life. Love is stronger than death. (Andrew Peterson's Lay Me Down poetically expresses this, one of Scott's favorites).

The Fall foliage carries all these themes of death: communal, liminal, transformational. Each leaf is an individual work of art, and a splash of color in the branch, the tree, the forest of seasonal unity. The crisp forest of color takes us into the edge of another world. And the dying leaves blaze glory, redeeming finitude into victory.

True confessions, Bone stories like Ezekiel and Halloween resonate for another reason: I (Jennifer) broke my left arm in October (after breaking my right arm in July). It would almost be a joke if it wasn't so hard to be without hands. This time the crushed pieces and joint impaction meant surgery, which our hero ortho surgeon son arranged, so we diverted to Colorado between visits with moms. Cancer, loss of home/normal/work/community, injuries in the family, violence in Tanzania and Uganda this weekend and Congo most days, conflicts between people we care for, loneliness and disability in aging moms, a lot of bad to plod through this year. 

So this holiday weekend we lean into the grace that pulls bones back together, that gives camaraderie along the strenuous road, that connects us to saints living and dead in the human family that will one day reune at home.

With Ruth and Caleb in CA

With Luke and Abby pre-op in CA

With my mom Judy in WV

Hoping to not have any more x-rays or surgery for a while. The autumn of life is both colorful and creepy.