Her name was Martha Veal, but some people called her Mrs. Beef, because she always had a beef about life. "Nobody cares about a poor widder," she would say to anybody who was within earshot and might be listening. "With taxes the way they are and everything so expensive, there's no way a widder can make ends meet today." Her complaints went on and on. Since I was in earshot, I heard all of them.

I have often thought about Mrs. Veal with her beefs. No doubt she was in a tough spot. Her husband had passed away a few years earlier, her income was quite limited, and she was very lonely. Her aching loneliness, I think, was the big source of anguish in her life. Most of her complaints began, "Nobody cares about a poor widder." Her constant grumbling repelled people who might otherwise have been her friends and a source of comfort and strength. With it she shot the life out of any joy people around her were trying to savor. In reality she had a lot of things she might have been thankful for. At 72 she had good health. She owned her home free and clear, and was able to live in the community that was familiar to her. She didn't have to live in a total care facility. All these were big plusses. If she had just been able to make friends, that would have removed many of her reasons for constant laments. To have friends she would have had to make the transition from complaining to gratitude for what she had and to the affirmation of those around her.

Martha found it hard to be thankful when she was bereft of those things that had brought her security for most of her life. I too find it hard to be thankful when things aren't going the way I want. But then I think of the expression of Habakkuk: "Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will exult in the God of my salvation." Hab. 3:17-18 I wonder how the prophet could exult in the midst of ;invasion and crop failure. Or how Paul when he was a prisoner in Rome could write, "I will continue to rejoice . . . " (Phil. 1:18) It seems to me he should be whining, like Martha Beef, or, I mean Veal. Paul says that his reason for rejoicing is that his prison stay will in some way turn out for his deliverance (v. 19). He adds that the forces that will bring this about are the prayers of the Philippian Christians and God's work through the Holy Spirit. Habakkuk had a similar faith. Immediately after his statement of rejoicing, he adds, "God, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights." He feels like he is bounding through the air, light-hearted and fleet-footed. Or like a deer, standing on a mountain top he has a high vantage-point for viewing life.

Some people magnify their losses and find reasons for constant complaints. Others magnify their plusses and find reason for gratitude and hope. Viktor Frankl discovered in the Nazi concentration camp that the one freedom no one could take away from him was the freedom to determine for himself the attitude he would maintain toward life and thereby his sense of well-being. He chose to magnify the plusses and found the ability to do so through imaginary conversations with his wife and through his faith. He observed later that those who survived the concentration camps were mainly those who found the strength to magnify the plusses of their existence.

The early pilgrims who celebrated their good harvest in 1621 acknowledged God's hand in their new abundance and at the same time the help they had received from Indians, such as Squanto, who gave them grain that would grow in rocky soil and showed them how to cook game and local vegetables. They brought to their three day celebration an English tradition of thanksgiving with which they were already familiar. The Indians they invited to celebrate with them had a tradition too. These natives observed six such periods of celebration and gratitude every year. When they discovered the colonists didn't have enough food to feed the large crowd, they more than doubled the supply from their winter stores. Gratitude, faith, and good-will among friendly people made it a celebration to be remembered. But their children forgot their good-will. Motivated by greed, and race and religious prejudice, they shot the life out of the Massasoit Indians in the following decades.

In 1863, when Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as an annual national holiday, the Civil War was raging. It too was motivated by greed and race prejudice. In his proclamation he stated, "May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?" Then he added, "We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own." Thanksgiving, he said, was to give us a tradition in which, "God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged . . . by the whole American people." It was to be a tradition of faith and gratitude to overcome the tradition of greed and prejudice, a time for magnifying to plusses of life to find courage to move into the future. This tradition can enrich life, build friendships, and resolve injustices. It is a tradition worth preserving and passing on to our posterity.

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