In many respects, our family’s Thanksgiving plans are unchanged from prior years. Three of our four children will arrive on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning with their spouses. The other, our oldest, will host his in-laws at their home on Thanksgiving and bring his family over on Friday. The groceries have been bought and the bird is thawing. We will pray together, laugh together and very likely eat too much together. Memories will be shared. Stories will be told. Some will play games. Others will very likely fall asleep in front of a football game. We’ve contributed to the needs of others, including through the Care Center’s holiday food drive and to our sister church in Honduras.

We have so very much to be thankful for in the opportunity to continue all of those traditions.

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When I was 18, I worked in a warehouse overnight loading trucks for the next day’s deliveries. The warehouse had a conveyor system that at one point separated into two tracks, one at about waist level and one that went way up high, 20 feet or more.

Every now and then a box or two would get turned the wrong way and the conveyors would back up. When that happened on the upper line, a couple of guys would have to go up and clear the jam. In hindsight, this didn’t meet OSHA standards. There weren’t any safety harnesses or really any place to walk except on the edges of the conveyor itself, hanging on to the supports that came down from the ceiling every six feet or so, and 20 feet below polished cement.

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