Gratitude Reflection by Kevin Steiner

Good morning.

I am Kevin Steiner and I along with my spouse, Laura and child, Addy, have been a part of this community since the summer of 2020. I have been asked to share a reflection on gratitude, but there are some to know about me before I get going.

I am (like each one of us) many things (spouse, father, friend, someone planning to run a 5K on Thanksgiving morning) — and also an infectious diseases physician. This occupation can be challenging at the best of times, but the past few years have been particularly tough. In my job, I meet patients for things ranging from minor infections to life-threatening ones and my patients often express a mix of uncertainty, fear, and hope. The nature of being an infectious disease physician is that there is a never-ceasing stream of people for whom we are asked our opinion — like many others in the medical professions including some of you listening today, I have spoken with and touched thousands of people who had previously been complete strangers.

Yet somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost any reflecting skills I may once have had — probably during medical training in which there simply did not seem to be time to reflect…there was (and continues to be) a need to keep moving forward. So, few people would describe me as being a reflective sort …perhaps at my best I can be thoughtful.

Also, our family travels to Virginia over the winter holidays. Laura often uses these drives to draft a list of meaningful experiences for our family from the year. Since this trip has yet to happen, I am a bit adrift about the events of the past year!

So I feel rather ill-equipped to offer a very public reflection about gratitude.

This is not because I do not feel grateful — I feel grateful often and in thousands of small and big things. I often find myself moved to a quick breath and inwardly whispered thank you — sometimes I’m unsure to where this thank you is even directed.

But I also struggle with gratitude. Perhaps I am not alone in this. I struggle with how easily one can slip into a sort of comparative blessing mentality. For instance, this year we purchased from our landlords the house that we had been renting since moving to Ohio — I can absolutely say I am grateful to have been spared the sorting, packing, and resettling of a major move. I am grateful our house seems sturdy, comfortable and comes with lovely neighbors and a school Addy can walk to.

And yet… so many people that I care for do not have a home, or have left their homes, or have been driven from their homes. We know that many around the world are hurting and struggling and fleeing — and our hearts break for people whose lives have been upended.

I am grateful to have been born into a family that was stable, loving, and nurtured my interests from a young age. I am grateful for Laura and for Addy and the gift of seeing them continually becoming and growing. 

And yet … many may not share similar grateful stories and experiences of families of origin and families of choice.

And so I struggle with this comparative gratitude mentality — the list can be endless with big and small things:

• I’m grateful for access to food when I’m hungry and water free of microorganisms when I’m thirsty (I am an infectious diseases physician after all!)
• I am grateful for nights of restful sleep, the bodily ability to go for a bicycle ride in safety, and for text messages sharing love and gentle reminders

And yet…we know that whether big or small, these experiences are not shared by all of humanity.

There is a danger in basing gratitude on some sort of false accounting ledger of cosmic blessings, thinking they have somehow been distributed by merit (especially if we recognize ourselves as on the “haves” side of the ledger)  — we must be wary of how this can lead to a sense of separation and difference. At its worst, it can reinforce the idea that the way the world seems to be now, is the way the world fundamentally is meant to be. As my mentor Dr Paul Farmer once said, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

And so I try to live into this tension most days and especially this week leading toward Thanksgiving.

So what can I say about gratitude?

For me, at this point in my life, I feel a deep sense of gratitude to be on a journey and for the opportunity to walk alongside people who are themselves living their own journeys. Over the past year I have felt this gratitude when …

• Sitting at the public health department with a person new to our country who is yearning for authentic words of welcome when they may be receiving all sorts of other messages from elsewhere
• It has been when sharing a meal with a schoolfriend of Addy’s and their parent and discussing our similar and differing hopes and worries
• It has been through joining my voice (however imperfectly) with others in the Christmas choir
• It has been through the chuckles, good-natured teasing, and sometimes profound moments of sharing with the CMC men’s breakfast group
• And it has been in a hospital surgery waiting room…listening, talking, and simply being while minutes and hours tick by for one major step in a journey into a new and unanticipated life

For these moments…for the gift of being shaped by the lives of others and perhaps in turn shaping them just a bit… for this journey, I have profound gratitude. And I am truly grateful.

Gratitude Reflection by Heidi Wyse

After the election on November 5th, I was in a dark place…feeling hopeless and depressed and very scared about the future. As Anne Lamott wrote in her Facebook post, I was feeling like a jello mold of uncertainty, with horrible shredded carrots in it. In other words, not in a place where I was doing so well with finding things to be grateful for. Right about then an email from Joel arrived, asking if I would share a reflection on gratitude for this service. Well, that felt like God or the universe saying, “Bruh! Lock in!” as my boys would tell me. So here I am.

I let myself grieve for some days, and then my thoughts turned to the future and what I can do to keep the hopelessness at bay. The problems we’re facing seem so large, what can I possibly do to make a difference? I found myself clinging to images like the night sky and how we focus not on the dark but on the pinpricks of light from the stars. Or thinking of tossing a small stone into a pond, and watching the ripples move outward into larger and larger circles. These things in nature remind me that I can choose something other than giving in to despair. I can choose to create light and love and peace in the space around me and hope that it ripples outward. This is what I can do.

So, with that in mind, for my gratitude reflection I’d like to tell you a story about a trip to the wilderness and what that experience taught me.

When I was in high school, I went with a group of students and two sponsors on a canoeing and backpacking trip in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. I’m not going to mince words here: it was awful. We were out in the backcountry for a week and it was cold and rained buckets basically the entire time. The mosquitoes were the size of small geese and they ate us alive. We planned a very ambitious circular route through the lakes, and the portages between them, when we had to carry our backpacks and canoes from one lake to another, were often a couple of miles long and very difficult. I was cold and wet and itchy and miserable and I just wanted to go home.

One of my best friends, Esther, was also on the trip. Esther is one of those people whose constant cheerfulness almost drives you batty. While the rest of us were huddled in the tent while it rained trying to stay dry, Esther would go and get a big stick and work on digging a trench around our tent to help the water flow away. And she was usually singing while she did it.

On our second to last day of the trip, Esther and I were paired up in a canoe and when we got to the portage, she offered to take the canoe by herself if I would take both packs. I said ok, helped her get the canoe upside down onto her shoulders, then put my pack on my back and hers on my front and off we went. We got to the end and rather than waiting for me to help her get the canoe off, she hoisted it herself and dropped it to the ground – where it landed right on a sharp rock which punctured the canoe near the front. I didn’t have to see our sponsors’ faces to know this was bad. We were out in the middle of nowhere; there were no cell phones. Even Esther looked crestfallen. But we figured it out – one of the sponsors took that canoe and sat in the back so the front was out of the water, and the second person got in the middle of another canoe, and we rowed to camp where we got it dry enough to put waterproof tape on it.

That night, a huge storm came through the camp. I remember being in our tent and feeling like I was holding it to the ground as the wind roared through and the lightning and thunder flashed and crashed. We were terrified. At one point we heard a huge crack that sounded very close by. Finally it calmed down and we slept.

The next morning, it was windy but the rain had stopped. We paddled out of camp and soon came to a huge tree that had been split down the middle by lightning and was black and scorched. We were all silent as we thought about how close that was to us.

But soon spirits lifted; we were finally dry and we were heading back to showers and pizza. We were laughing and singing and having a wonderful time, and suddenly, maybe because of overcoming obstacles like broken canoes and scary thunderstorms and making it back alive, we were giddy with happiness and the whole trip seemed like a resounding success. During our lunch break Esther stood on a rock and sang the national anthem very loudly; I don’t know why that song, other than she was happy and wanted to sing something with gusto, and her joy was infectious, and I realized that her optimism through all of the challenges on that trip had kept us going the whole time.

I wanted to tell you this story because when I look back at my teenage years this was a real turning point for me. This was the time I learned – or maybe I should say Esther taught me – that gratitude is a choice. The situation can seem dire, but if you choose to be grateful, to find the positives and focus on those, the circumstances may not change but your outlook on it will. This is a lesson that has served me through many other difficult situations in my life, and a lesson I have tried to impart to my boys on many a rainy camping trip.

Esther is still one of my best friends; she lives in Kansas now. I texted her to ask for her thoughts on gratitude. This is part of what she said: “Gratitude is endless. When I tried to write down three gratitudes a day, I often wanted to write more! If asked for all our gratitudes, we would not run dry. The cliche ‘attitude of gratitude’ is real.”

Most of you are probably familiar with the poem “I’ve Learned” by Maya Angelou. It’s one of those poems that gets you because it feels so true. In part, she says, “I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I’d like to conclude by telling you a few of the things that I’ve learned. I’ve learned that gratitude is a choice. I’ve learned that choosing gratitude can make a difference not just to yourself, but it can have a ripple effect on those around you. I’ve learned that gratitude leads to joyfulness and not the other way around. I’ve learned to hang on to good friends. I’ve learned that I still have so, so much to learn and that in itself is something to be grateful for.

I am grateful by Cindy Fath

Good morning, I am Cindy Fath.  I’d like to tell you a story about God, my family and lots of other people, too.

What am I grateful for? 

Earlier this fall, as the election loomed and my nervous mind began to scan the “what ifs,”  my thoughts turned to some of our Columbus neighbors who are known as immigrants, as people of color, as queer –  and the risks they might face.  Well….. the worse-case scenario has become a reality. Those neighbors, whom Jesus wants me to love,  may well be at risk. 

Now, how does this tie in with gratitude?  My story goes back quite a few years.

Around the year 1990, nearly 25 years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom of four small children, living in a small all-white town outside of Cincinnati.   Oddly, and unexpectedly, I began to receive pictures in my mind, call them visions, if you will, of our home filled with brown and black children, women and men and clearly from many places around the world. It was so far from my  reality at that time,  that even to this day, the shock and incongruity has never worn off.   And, those imprinted images wouldn’t leave.  It was confusing, because at that time, I lived in a predominantly white world. 

Until I didn’t.

First, there were the faces of color that were part of our urban Mennonite church that we began to attend. Approximately the same time, God moved us to a Mennonite volunteer house near the University of Cincinnati in an urban neighborhood.  Each evening, as I prepared dinner, I watched a lonely parade of international students walking toward their homes after classes. For the most part, I knew they had no one waiting for them; they were often far from their families. My heart began to ache for them.  We received permission to turn that monstrosity VS house into international student housing.  Our lives were upended completely for the next 6-7 years. Each evening, more than a dozen students and others gathered around our table. Our revolving front door likely welcomed hundreds of people who sometimes stayed a few nights, or ate with us or lived with us. We learned intentionally and by osmosis. We made mistakes. It still gives me shivers up and down my spine to think that God had orchestrated it all. I am grateful for those years.

But there was more in store. In 2000, through a series of events too long to share here, we moved our family to Uzbekistan.  To a land of extreme hospitality;  in a culture where “a guest is more valued than your own father.”  Many new friends opened their homes to us. We sat on their floors, around tablecloths of plentiful or meager feasts. It was humbling. We felt loved and honored and cared for. And we opened our home in return as best we knew how. Every Tuesday evening, a group of young ladies, many from our neighborhood or friends of our daughter Lydia, and one of their moms, joined us for a simple meal, sharing stories about Jesus, singing, and becoming a community of believers. Faces of color! Our understanding of hospitality grew. Thank you God!

After 6 years, we moved to Turkey, where except for one of nine years, Jim and I were alone, with our own family far away.  We missed our kids, yes, but we rarely lacked for family.  I am so grateful to the myriads of ways we were welcomed by other families and blessed by our neighbors and friends.  In particular, our neighbor, Seher Boga, welcomed me into her family where I was adopted as a daughter and sister.  In the last three years, I’ve lost two of my Boga sisters to cancer.  Another has cancer.  It’s not always been easy. Loss is hard and multiplies the grief,  but being included and being given membership in a family while we lived abroad is something I will always cherish and be grateful for.

Now, we are nearing the end of 2024.  I often wonder what God has in store for my family?  Will there be more faces?

For some weeks now, my heart has begun visualizing how crucial hospitality might become in the days ahead. At times, I am fearful of what might happen, but I am learning to think proactively in these fraught times. Instead of Anne Frank, might our homes shelter a Halima, or a Richardson, or a Mouloukou, or a Seyahat, or a little Tadeo. Recently, on a Sunday morning, we heard how the prophet Elijah was sent to a widow in Zaraphath and as a result of feeding Elijah, the very small amount of flour she had was multiplied and kept her, her son and Elijah alive.  God was and is in the details. God is among us.

And I am grateful to be part of this blessed community.