In warming June light, the waitress, lips outlined in this shocking fire engine red and eyebrows painted in these muddy-brown bridges arching high, she tells the two men waiting at the door that the table by the window is available. She points to the table beside us.
I straighten the cream and sugar packets, align the salt and pepper. The Farmer leans back in his chair. I glance a moment towards the door.
The waitress is carrying the menus but the man in the red and gingham shirt, the shorter of the two and the one I see with the wedding band, he shakes his head. “Nah. Something bigger?” His accent is thicker than her eyebrows. “A table not quite so… romantic.” Both men chuckle and so does the Farmer, gentle and quiet, a reassurance, and he clasps my hands. I smile. Our knees touch. The two men take a table for four by the counter and the teenage boy rolling out dough, his chef’s hat and dough both flour white and thin.
The waitress brings our juice. The men scrape their chairs back across scuffed, planked floors. They sit with their shirt collars spread wide, eagle wings, tethered to earth only with the flashing gold chains at their necks. We sip and they volley words across the table, European, and foreign, animated and fluid.
Behind them on the flat screen, soccer players punt air-borne leather globes with their shaved heads gleaming all sweaty. They wear flags on their chests.
At the table across from us, three men with wavy black hair and in wide-legged black jeans, they talk in wide gestures and loud laughter. Their olive skin catches patches of sunlight from the window. The televised soccer ball flies into netting and the screen crowd screams victory and flags wave wild and men cheer and this room is global.
That is the point when I look around and I feel white and colorless and weak, when I feel I have no culture, no roots, no nation, and I ask The Farmer with the thick hands and broad shoulders, “What is it like – to know where you come from?” His eyes are on the screen and he’s grinning.
The Dutch play the next round and against Slovakia.
I study his face and he is international and when did time write years across his forehead in those lines? “What is it like to have your own ethnicity, your parents from the same place and country and culture?” I want to know. I want in.
His eyes leave the screen, find my face. “Being Dutch? I don’t think about it really.” I raise my own thick eyebrows. “Really?” I shift and our knees brush again.
“Yeah, there is boterkoek and oliebolen and Maggi in chicken soup with meatballs … and having a name that starts with a V…” I smile. “But as for a sense of identity and knowing who I am? When Mom and Dad didn’t teach us the actual language?” He picks up his napkin. “I think I lost my culture.”
The waitress brings our plates. And I think of the only real people that are mine and His relentless Romance and the tables around us hum with homelands and the Farmer reaches for my hand across our table for two. I think of the lost language of thanks and I wonder what will happen to the culture of Christians if we don’t speak the tongue taught by the Father and I take his hand and I bow the head to say grace.
He gives grace and we speak the language of Christians when we give thanks.
This is who I am. Gratitude is the culture of the sinners made saints. We whisper Amen. We eat.
Our skin catch whole lands of light.
Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is,
the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.
… learning more words of my Father-tongue… the culture of the kingdom and the language of Christians: the giving of thanks…
1691. rain on sleepy Sunday afternoons
692. empty beaches
1693. robins at 5 am
1695. farmers checking rain gauges
1696. mist in the morning
1697. brownies
1698. thermometers and advil and reading
1699. after midnight baths to cool fevers
1700. rubbing feet
1701. boy love
1702. laundry and the water, machine and determination to do it
1703. surviving my first earthquake
1704. tickling the kid washing dishes
1705. bubble splashing with the kid washing dishes
1706. listening to words suffused with wonder
1707. fresh eggs from new hens
1708. believing
1709. new vacuum cleaners
1710. The Farmer reading Scripture aloud and slow to soothe my rising fears
1711. breathing deep and trusting early on a Monday morning
1712. smiling anyways
1713. falling behind and letting go
1714. possibilities!
Want to drink the joy elixir? Become a Joy Finder? Consider joining the Gratitude Community – just jump in with your own counting!
How to begin your own 1000 Gift List ::: How Gratitude Can Change your Life
( Drop me a line if choose to begin giving intentional thanks and gather fresh joy and I will happily add either your name or a web link to the Gratitude Community
I’m slowly getting caught up on meeting all you beautiful folks who have joined the Gratitude Community. Thank you for your kind grace and patience!I’m so looking forward to meeting you all soon!)
If you’d like to share your endless list of Hallelujah! – (please, jump in!) — just add the directURL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
Photos: giving thanks for grace here… light setting across our fields
Share your thoughts? If you would like Holy Experience posts quietly tucked into your reader or emailed to your inbox for free…
