Thank You, God

Whit has invited friends to the shop for Thanksgiving dinner: Tom and Agnes Riley, June Kendall and her daughter Connie, and a boy named Rodney, who stays with the Rileys while his father's job keeps him out on the road. Rodney's dad was supposed to pick him up that morning and never showed, and his mother left when he was very little, so the Rileys have brought him along to the table.

Before anyone eats, Whit brings out a tradition his wife started years ago. A kernel of dried Indian corn sits on every plate, and as a basket passes around the table each guest drops a kernel in and names something they are thankful for. Connie squirms at going first, so June steps in with thanks for sixteen years of her sometimes terrible bundle of joy, and Connie answers with a ditto aimed back at her mother. Tom is thankful for the season itself. But when the basket reaches Rodney, he balks. He knows all about Thanksgiving, he says - he has just written a school report on the Pilgrims and Abraham Lincoln - yet Whit points out that he has left out the most important part: the One being thanked. Rodney answers that he does not have much to thank God for. With no mom and a dad too busy to make it home for a holiday, he does not blame God, but he does not feel like thanking him either. Whit reminds him that the Apostle Paul told the Ephesians to give thanks to God for everything, and the best way he can explain that is to share what he himself is most thankful for: Fiona Donneral, the stepmother who came into his life after his own mother died when he was about five.

His story carries everyone back to North Carolina, where young John Avery and Fiona are out horseback riding. Resting between races, he confesses that it was he, and not McDuff the dog, who ruined her wedding dress with chocolate cake batter back in Scotland. Fiona admits she has known all along, since not even a smart dog leaves handprints, and she never said anything because he had been through enough already, with his mother dying and a stepmother coming in. God has a purpose in everything, she tells him; John Avery answers that this is easy to say for someone who has never had anything taken from her. Then she races him to a tree, runs into the branch of an elm, and wakes complaining that the room is too dark to see. It is the middle of the afternoon. Fiona is blind.

The months that follow are a whirlwind of doctors, and every one of them says the same thing: it is hopeless. Fiona passes through denial, anger and self-pity into a peace that John Avery can neither understand nor share. One night he breaks down over the family Bible reading, unable to go on past a passage about giving thanks always, for all things, and Fiona follows him to his room. He finally admits he is unhappy because she is not: now she truly has lost something, and she is still not unhappy, and that makes him angry. Fiona answers with an old Scottish prayer her mother taught her: "Lord, I thank thee a thousand times for the roses. Help me to thank thee for the thorns as well." The thorns remind us how beautiful the roses really are, she says; even the bad has a purpose. The rest of her happiness comes from the Bible - not just reading the words, but knowing the One who says them - and that night she helps John Avery ask Jesus into his heart.

Back at the table, Whit finishes: Fiona helped him past his mother's death, got him into the habit of reading the Bible every day, and led him to Christ. All those roses came out of the thorn of her blindness. When you are a Christian, he tells Rodney, God always has something good in store, and even the bad things are pointing you toward him. Rodney decides he knows what he is thankful for after all: that his dad never picked him up, because otherwise he would not have learned what to be thankful for. Whit hands him the honor of saying grace over the turkey, and Rodney keeps it simple - thank you, God, for everything.