Thanksgiving is a Transaction

I own a small-town general store. (I don’t actually. This is hypothetical. Now is not a good time to be a shop owner, sadly.) A kindly older man from town, Larry, always pays for his purchases on store credit; he knows I expect to collect payment in the spring. One day in late winter, he comes in to tell me he is broke; he can’t pay. In my good nature (again, hypothetical; I’m not this nice) I tell Larry his debt is canceled. He can go home. Larry says thank you, and he goes.

What just transpired? Did Larry’s debt disappear? Certainly not. His debt became mine. I gave him product for which I’d already paid, and then I didn’t have the product nor the money I used to first buy it. My inventory went down and my revenue did not go up.

Larry’s debt was canceled. But was the debt gone from existence? No. I started my day without a debt, and then suddenly I had a new debt myself when Larry’s debt was gone.

A transaction has surely taken place, and someone’s pockets just got emptier.

But at the same time, Larry did pay, in a way; he gave the only thing he had, which was his gratitude. This, then, was the transaction: I bought product from my wholesaler with cash, then I sold it to Larry, accepting his gratitude as “payment.”

Sure, Larry could have been ungrateful. He could have demanded the debt be canceled instead of asking debt forgiveness, and if I obliged, he then could have walked out feeling entitlement instead of thankfulness. But this would be a sort of perversion of what should have happened. And what should have and actually happened, while not necessarily fair (in the sense of Larry paying, in cash, what was due) nor the ideal, was good. My forgiveness of his debt was actually my taking on of his debt, in a show of grace and mercy. My accepting his gratitude as payment was virtuous and good.

Enough about this fictional version of me a.k.a. who’s far better than the me you know.

My short point is this: When we are genuinely thankful, it means that we have been given something of worth that was neither ours nor entirely meant for us, and yet became ours by some unmerited favor, not by a payment we’ve made for it.

Now, we may say the words, “Thank you,” out of cordiality when we pay a fair price for an item. If I walk through a man’s field, pick a wild apple off a tree growing in his field, and give him a quarter for it, I may say thank you — I am pleased you entered into this exchange with me — but I do not have much about which to be grateful to the man. He has 25 cents more than he had before, without having lifted a finger; it was a wild tree on his property.

But change the situation slightly. He sells me an apple at the farmer’s market that he picked from a tree he grew after years of care and tender pruning work. Or better yet, he gives me a free sample. Now I have something for which to be thankful. He did all the work, and it only cost me 25 cents (or nothing) for this apple. I am grateful to him for the honeycrisp delight of this transaction.

If at the same farmer’s market, I buy a croissant for $40, it had better be a dang good croissant. And if it’s just mediocre, or flat out bad, I am not thankful for that croissant. There is nothing to be grateful for on my end in that transaction; I feel I have been ripped off. I unknowingly entered into a very uneven exchange, and I am not thankful.

The baker gave me far less than what I paid for. The farmer gave me far more. Gratitude is the natural payment I offer the farmer in return.

Every November, we actually stop to consider our thankfulness. What an amazing thing. I’ve written elsewhere that we can’t be thankful to our friends for our friends. This doesn’t make any sense. When we say thank you for something, we don’t thank the object; we thank the giver of the object.

With few exceptions (understandable ones, often), we all inherently recognize that we have in this life much more than we’ve earned or paid for. We are experiencing what some call common grace. We breathe, we laugh, we love, we sing (with masks on, ugh), we dance, we experience nature’s bounty and beauty and enjoy — all at no cost to us.

A person may work long, hard hours, and receive due compensation for their work. They may use that money to buy a good home, good belongings, good food. These are more or less even exchanges, and technically, gratitude is not due. And yet, what has this person done to earn the able body to do the job, the immense complexity of the brain that allows the thinking necessary to complete the work, the sun under which the worker can see the task at hand, and so on? Nothing. And so the worker should be thankful for those things.

When you head in for your third helping of marshmallow yams, the gratitude you feel is for much more than tasty food that you probably paid for with your hard-earned cash — especially in this, a year without potluck. It is for the family and friends you did not buy nor earn, for the air you breathe, for another day to experience wonder and joy.

You’re not just glad. You’re thankful.

As you sit around the table this Thursday — or the Zoom call — recognize that the transaction we’ve described is taking place in real time. Then be sure you consider who the shopkeeper might be, who is happily carrying a debt on your behalf at the other end of the transaction. He is delighted to receive your thanks, and he actually has so much more to give you — so much more debt he can and desires to cancel for you.

As I wish a Happy Thanksgiving to you all, I leave you with the words of an 1878 hymn that, if you’re fortunate, will sound familiar.

I hear the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small,
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”

Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.

Lord, now indeed I find
Thy pow’r and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.

And when, before the throne,
I stand in Him complete,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
My lips shall still repeat.

Jesus paid it all,
All to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.

🍂