NOVEMBER 10, 2003

GRACE AT MEALS

Worship doesn’t just happen on Sunday in church. Every time we say Thank You to God before eating a meal we are having a mini-worship service. In our Sunday worship experience, we learn who God is and how to respect and honor him. The Teacher assigns us thanksgiving homework which we do through saying table grace prayers.

This simple little exercise is probably much more important to the building of our faith than we ever realize. Three times a day we are acknowledging that God is the source of all the blessings that support our lives. Even if our prayers are repetitive and almost unconscious, we are establishing a habit of being thankful that becomes part of the pattern of our lives.

In my childhood home, our prayer was as simple as can be:
“Dear Lord, thank you for this food. Bless it to us. In Jesus Name, Amen”
We children would repeat it together in a sing-song way, and then dive into the food. The prayer of thanks seldom involved any conscious awareness.

But years later, I have had a recurring experience in prayer. If I bow to pray at night, or in a prayer group, or even leading prayer out loud in a morning worship service at church, my initial words in my mind are sometimes an automatic
“Dear Lord, I thank you for this food . . . .”
I usually get this far before my conscious mind takes over and begins the current prayer I want to express to God. This shows me how indelibly the simple table grace of my childhood has imprinted itself on my mind. And along with the words of the prayer, an automatic attitude of thanksgiving has been imprinted within me as well.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” his disciples were very aware of God’s hand in giving them their daily bread. They walked by wheat fields where people were laboring to harvest the crop. If there had been little rain, the crop was small, and they could see that with their own eyes. Later, they could watch the farmers carry the grain to the market, and then witness it being sold. They knew that their daily bread came from God.

But our daily bread comes from Von’s. Or it did until the recent strike. Now we may be buying instead from Trader Joe’s and paying more for the bread. The higher cost does not come from lack of rain, but from arguments about salaries and healthcare benefits. It is much harder for us to see that God is the one who gives us our daily bread.

That makes it all the more important that we get into the pattern of saying grace over our meals. Even more than Jesus’ disciples, we need this regular reminder of our dependence on our gracious God.

Thanksgiving Day is a time when people catch up on their homework. The discipline of thanking God three times a day at meals is worship homework, and many people have been neglecting their homework. So, on Thanksgiving Day they try to do all their homework for the past year at once.

For those who regularly thank God over meals, their worship homework is caught up. For them, Thanksgiving Day is a bonus opportunity from the Teacher, and it brings blessings that are rich and rewarding.

–Pastor George Van Alstine