Thanksgiving

Two years ago was the only time I was in the States during my three years in China, and it was because I got an email saying Grandmother had likely had a stroke and wouldn't survive the week.  It was a Sunday afternoon a few months before China's Great Firewall fully blocked the Gmail app on phones (everything Google is blocked over there, but at that point I could still read messages on my phone couldn't reply to them until I got on my computer's VPN).  I was on a crowded city bus in crazy weekend traffic heading home from a time of fellowship when I saw the news.  Next commenced a frenzied effort to book a last minute ticket that wasn't some crazy-insane-demand-your-first-born dollar amount, edit the rest of my students' rough drafts, holiday-ready the apartment (though somehow I left a piece of fruit on the bed in the morning... always a nice welcome home - surprise this fruit has been sitting in the tropical humidity for a month and it's happy to see you!), arrange for my students to email me their final projects, and find volunteers to mark their exams for me as the next day began final exam week.

Less than 24 hours later I began a two day journey home, with a carry on bag full of papers to grade, and finally landed in DC where my nephew Nick treated me to my first pumpkin spice latte in three years in the Dulles arrivals hall before we whisked away straight to Grandmother's bedside.  This was also the winter of Snowpocalypse, so stepping out of the terminal Mother Nature immediately reminded me what cold is.  Grandmother wasn't communicative at that point in time, but there were indications that she could hear us.  We played her favorite Gospel CDs and read to her from the Bible.  Only once did I hear her say anything -- Mom asked her if she remembered eating the Belgian chocolate Aunt Peggy had brought her in the past.  She grabbed Mom's hand, looked at her very intently, and declared "Yes, I remember!  You should bring me some!"  A few days later -- two years ago today -- Grandmother, my Dad's mom and my last living grandparent, passed into Heaven's gates and finally met her Savior at the age of 95.

But you know what?  She was born dead.  You see, she was born in 1918 during the influenza epidemic which killed 50 million people -- more than the total who had just died in World War I.  Her mom had the flu when she gave birth, and my Grandmother came out "black".  The doctor pronounced her dead and discarded her, intent on concentrating his efforts on saving her mom (which he did).  Meanwhile, her aunt took her into another room, cried out to God in prayer, and life breathed into her... for 95 years.

At her funeral, on a cold snowy day, her testimony was read.  It recounted this story and urged all of her descendants to live their lives with an attitude of thanksgiving for the miracle of life God had given her and thus given each of us.  She lived the humble life of a servant we are all meant to -- always giving and taking care of others.  She didn't do this because she was rich or because she didn't have problems -- she was widowed three times; she did it because she was thankful.

I hope I can learn to live in a perpetual state of thankfulness and to serve her legacy, Christ's legacy, better.  And I hope we can all remember to pray in faith impossible prayers as her aunt did because God enjoys the impossible.

Mary Lee Seeber

26 November 1918 -- 13 January 2014 

Fittingly, her birthday sometimes fell on Thanksgiving.