Dear Fellowship Southwest Friends,

Thanksgiving is the appropriate season to write to you. My heart overflows with thanks to all of you—individually and collectively—as I count down my final days as founding coordinator of Fellowship Southwest. How retirement arrived so soon (I feel I should be 32, not 65) baffles my imagination, but this is the moment.

Happy birthday to me.

There, we got that out of the way. This week, I’m celebrating a “significant” birthday. It’s not round. It’s a gateway. My wife, Joanna, will celebrate the same-number feliz cumpleaños in five months. Because of those birthdays, we’re passing from one life-phase to another.

Fellowship Southwest will celebrate its fourth birthday this Sunday. How can Aug. 1, 2017—our launch date—paradoxically seem like only yesterday and decades ago? Well, joyful activity seems to make time fly. And we have traversed the pandemic, which made weeks feel like months and months seem like years.

Can you think of a word more maligned than “politics”?

Some people believe it’s a dirty term affixed to a despicable craft. That’s because, for the most part, it’s practiced so poorly.

Pulpit plagiarism has been making the news again.

“Again” is the operative word. This is not new. A couple of friends, now in their 80s, recall making a wager about which swiped sermon a famous Baptist preacher/evangelist would deliver to a captivated crowd at Oklahoma’s Falls Creek Assembly when they worked there as young men. That was at least 50, maybe 60, years ago.

A paradox of the refugee crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border sat smiling on the floor of a Chihuahuan desert shelter. She cooed and waved and charmed three Fellowship Southwest visitors.

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall hearing Memorial Day called by another name, Decoration Day. And if the old-timers who mentioned it had their stories straight, the term originated as a call to decorate the graves of fallen veterans and evolved into a day to lay flowers on the graves of departed family.

Immigrant children dominate my memory.

Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry operates shelters and feeding programs along the U.S.-Mexico border. I’ve met hundreds of refugees—mostly from Central America, but also from South America, the Caribbean and even Africa—in Mexican cities from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

With the U.S. presidential inauguration just six days away, Congress already in session and state legislatures gearing up, Fellowship Southwest is looking toward the future with hope. Of course, our ultimate trust is in God and not government. But we pledge to pray for and promise to work toward cooperation that results in justice and in shared compassion for people in need.

Tragically, the sight of domestic terrorists marauding the U.S. Capitol should not have surprised anyone.

As 2020 recedes with each darkening day, families the world over might pretend (who could blame them?) their Advent candles represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Imagine little Cindy Lou, reading the initial Advent meditation: “Every night this week, we will light the first purple Advent candle, Death. Next week, we will light the second purple candle, Famine, followed by the pink candle, War. And then, the week before Christmas, we will light the final purple candle, Conquest.”

Thinking about Thanksgiving from the sinkhole otherwise known as 2020 seems at once harder and easier than it has in years past.

Unless you got married or had a baby or backed into a positive life-transforming event, you’ll probably agree 2020 is the sorriest year in most of our lifetimes. But it also has revealed—in contrast—the simple pleasures and joys for which we can be thankful in any year.