Tag Archives: thanksgiving

Praise God with Us for His Blessings in 2025

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Praise God with Us for His Blessings in 2025

In the past couple of weeks, I looked over my daily diary entries from 2025 and was impressed by how many good things God had done for us. I wrote a prayer of thanksgiving to God. He prompted me to share the facts with you blog post readers, since many of you have prayed for us. Thank God with us for these many answers to prayer:

January: Jo came to church with me for the first time since her back surgery in mid-November. She no longer has lower back pain, but does have a dropped foot and needs a walker. A friend gave Jo a high-quality wheelchair so that I can push her in it when she needs to travel farther than she can with her walker. I started applying Zostrix pepper ointment to stop the jabbing pains in both of Jo’s feet. Our grandson Aidan became engaged to a lovely Christian girl from Arkansas, and they asked me to perform the wedding ceremony in May.

February: We decided that this will be our last winter on our acreage. We followed up on our mid-2024 research of potential retirement facilities and hope to be accepted by one in Stony Plain. Aidan’s fiancée, Lin, visited us in Canada, and we finalized the wedding ceremony details. When my recliner chair broke, Leanne helped me choose a new one.

March: On Sunday, Jo, holding onto her walker, was able to stand for all four hymns for the first time. We celebrated our 63rd wedding anniversary with a special dinner at the Sawmill restaurant. Jo was fitted with an Ankle Foot Orthotic brace to help stabilize her dropped foot.

April: I completed the retirement forms for Wycliffe Bible Translators, effective later this year after 60 years of service.

May: We enjoyed our few days in Arkansas, where I performed the ceremony, and we celebrated Aidan and Lin’s Wedding on May 4.

June: Jo hosted her ladies’ coffee visit for the first time since her back surgery. Jo and I enjoyed a surprise visit with a Jamaican man whom I had recruited 22 years ago and trained to be the director of Wycliffe Caribbean, and we were pleased to see he was still active in the organization. We signed the final papers for our move into a suite that will be vacated in September at the Forest Ridge Place retirement home in Stony Plain.

July:  We had a formal inspection of the suite. We completed making out our wills with a lawyer and sent email copies to our daughters. We are learning to switch from a lifetime of extreme frugality, holding onto things we might need someday, to extreme generosity, giving away vanloads of our books, clothing, furniture, tools, and household items to our daughters’ families and to the Mennonite Central Committee thrift store.

August: Our daughters helped us sort and give away large quantities of dinnerware, glasses, dishes, and kitchen equipment to the MCC thrift store.

September: We provided the banking information to pay our monthly lease and began moving items into the suite, measuring the space and buying suitable furniture, since many of our current pieces were too large for the limited space. The new furniture was assembled and finished by our daughters and their spouses. Wycliffe had an online alumni celebration, and I gave a brief report on the most personally significant part of my sixty-year-long career with Wycliffe: the Canela translation program!

October:  We moved our bed into our suite on October 11 and began our new life there. I sold the gold filling from a tooth, a few thin, broken gold chains, and a small ring for $380!

November: I had some biopsies done on a large brown area of my scalp: sun damage, but not malignant! I regularly tell a brief God-story about our translation ministry at the weekly hymn-sing meetings. Jo has already learned the names of many of the 120 residents in this complex. Pray that I catch up with her soon.

December: Jo and I praise God for the large direct personal gifts we have received, some from longtime ministry partners, and some from new friends. We are now living a totally different life and need God’s help to live it well. We are reading The Power of a Praying Grandparent and the Seasons of Marriage. Join us in thanking God for our upcoming full two-week Christmas vacation with sixteen of our family members, hosted by Kurt and Valorie Jones in San Jose, CA. Yes, we’ll take some pictures and publish them on in our blog post for January.

Note: Our longtime email address jack_popjes@wycliffe.ca will no longer work after December 31. Please use jackpopjes@gmail.com and popjesjo@gmail.com from now on.

 

Giving Thanks to God for Small Blessings

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The Emergency
Jo’s doctor called her on October 31, it was not a ‘Trick or Treat’ call. “I read your reports, you need to go to Emergency right now for an immediate MRI of your lower back and hips.” Jo had been on the waiting list for that test as well as a neurologist appointment for well over six months.

I took her to ER immediately. She was checked and admitted to the hospital and eventually had the test. After a week, she was released, taking narcotics for the pain and crippling, along with a walker while waiting for a date for another type of test and a neurology appointment. Two weeks later, she suddenly had such severe pain that we called 911. She ended up in the largest hospital in the city with neurosurgeons on staff. After more tests, she underwent a lumbar laminectomy surgery. The bone caps on four of her lower vertebrae were removed to allow the spinal cord to expand and operate normally.

The Lesson
That stopped the hip pains and back pains, but since she is 85 years old, she is taking a long time to recover. And that’s when we began to learn to thank God for small, even tiny, improvements: the subject of this blog post and of the photo of the mountain-ash tree loaded with red berries. Each of those berries caught one snowflake, and then another, and another. Multi-millions of tiny snowflakes later, this was the startling result!

Jo needed constant attention and regular medications. I kept track on daily computer charts for when to give her six different types of medicines, as well as food,  bathroom, temperature, emotions, sleep, and changes of position like sitting up, lying on a couch, and, of course, changing the bandage on the six-inch-long, 18-staples incision.

We read some Scriptures about having the right attitude, giving thanks even for the small things:
In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. (1 Thes. 5:18.) It was a good thing I like keeping charts because the tiny day-by-day improvements might have been overlooked.

The Examples
Sometimes, what made us give thanks to God was just one less Oxycodone tablet than the day before. Or a tiny improvement in digestion. Or a bit less redness in the incision after the staples were removed, an hour more sleep at night, or getting out of bed by herself for the first time, or a day without Tylenol.
We encouraged ourselves with Scriptures like Job 8:7, “Though your beginnings will seem humble, your future will be prosperous.”
And Isaiah 28:10, Speaking about bringing rest and refreshing, he wrote, “Do this, do that, here a little, there a little.”
And Zech. 4:6, 10 “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty. “Who dares despise the day of small things? They shall rejoice.”

God was guiding us with His “still small voice” as He did when he spoke to Elijah, (1 Kings 19:11). And that is okay for Jo and me. We don’t need a whirlwind or an earthquake type of miracle. We will just keep on noting each tiny improvement on the chart and thank Him for that.
God can even make tiny things like a mustard seed grow into a great tree; a comparison Jesus used to illustrate the Kingdom of God. (Luke 13:18-20) It’s a good application to be thankful for Jo’s small improvements in health and strength.

Pray that we will hang in there for the long haul, in the manner of Galatians 6:9, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
And those of you who are in different situations, practice giving thanks for even small improvements and praising God as he works, bit by bit, towards a positive solution for you.

May God grant you all a blessed Christmas and New Year’s celebration. My next blog post will be in mid-January, as God wills.

Blessings,
Jack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Give Thanks for What?

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We Canadians not only celebrate Thanksgiving a month ahead of our American cousins, we started doing so forty years before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts.

An English explorer named Martin Frobisher had been trying to find a northern passage to the Pacific through the ice floes of northern Canada. He failed to find a passage, but he did set up a column and said prayers of thanksgiving. He gave thanks, however, not for a bountiful harvest, but for the fact that his ship survived the trip—another ship traveling with him was lost in a storm. Eventually Thanksgiving became a yearly national harvest celebration.

I read the first Scriptural mention of a national time of thanksgiving in Exodus 15 this week. Led by Moses and his older sister Miriam, the Israelite nation celebrated on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. They, also, did not celebrate a bountiful harvest and food in abundance. All they had was leftover bread, and it was only flat, unleavened stuff.

Instead, they sang about their escape from Egypt, about the drowning of their slave masters, and, of course, about their firstborn children being spared when every firstborn man, woman, child, or animal in Egypt died. There was plenty of joy, though no mention of turkey and all the trimmings, and even less mention of ham. That first Israelite national thanksgiving, like Frobisher’s, was a celebration of survival.

HaitiThe same morning, I read this account in Exodus, I saw the devastation hurricane Matthew had caused in Haiti. The category 4 hurricane passed directly over the western part of this island, killing more than 130 people and turning cities into a gigantic garbage dumps. People are still mostly without electric power, running water or telephone. It will take years to repair all the damage.

I wonder what kind of thanksgiving Haitians will celebrate this weekend. Or million or more people who are desperately evacuating eastern Florida and South Carolina. There will be neither turkey nor ham. No cranberries either. Any celebration will likely be a celebration of survival, much like that first thanksgiving recorded in Exodus.

Survival may be a good thing for all of us to focus on in our thanksgiving celebrations. Instead of focusing only on the abundance of food and material things we have and enjoy, we could focus on the terrible things that did not happen to us. For instance:

For the yearly 40,000 kilometres of safe automobile travel, or the accidents we were involved in but we survived. For the fires or floods that did not destroy our homes, or which did, but from which we escaped with our lives. For the cancer that did not strike in our families, or which did, but we survived.  For safe arrival home after travel abroad in high-risk countries.

We live in a dangerous, suffering world. The nightly TV news shows death and destruction in myriad forms. We sit and watch the horrific results of suicide bombings, school shootings, of devastating floods and landslides, of raging fires, of countrywide conflict and the resulting millions of starving, fleeing refugees.

May the TV news drive us to pray for those still in the midst of these disasters. And while we watch, let’s not forget to breathe a prayer of thanksgiving to God that He spared us.

We Remember Them

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I was about five years old when my parents told me what had happened to our country, the Netherlands, when I was a baby.

“Bad soldiers came from another country.” they said, “They came breaking God’s rules. They lied to us, and they stole things, they hurt people. There were so many of them, all with big guns, that they chased away all our good soldiers and our good policemen.”

I nodded. I had already seen lots of those enemy soldiers with their guns on the streets, and had heard about them stealing bicycles and radios from people’s houses.

“But now they are also starting to steal men—daddies, uncles, big brothers, even young grandpas,” my mom said. “They are locking them into train boxcars and taking them to their own country to work like slaves on farms, and in mines and in factories.”

“If you see an army truck on our street, with soldiers going into houses, you come right home. Don’t shout, just come home and once you are inside, tell us about it. Then daddy can hide.”

I remember times my dad crawled into a space below the floor of a back room and my mom closing the trap door. Then we rolled the carpet back over it and with both of us pushing, moved the heavy sideboard back into place. I brushed out the tracks on the carpet so it looked as if nothing had been moved.

poppyPinning on a poppy in preparation of Remembrance Day, I remember the day Canadian soldiers freed my city. I wrote the memory years ago and read it during a talk at a Remembrance Chapel at the local Christian School on Friday. I repeat it here in honour of those who gave their lives in war so that my countrymen and I might live in peace.

I squirmed and squeezed my thin seven-year-old body through the jostling crowd until I conquered a spot on the curb. The bright sunshine warmed my face, arms and bare knees as I squinted into the light. I clutched my little paper flag, the Dutch red, white and blue, ready to wave, ready to shout and ready to sing a welcome to our rescuers. It was Tuesday, May 8, 1945.

The approaching rumble of a column of Canadian army trucks started the crowd up the road cheering and singing. The noise grew louder as huge, dull green trucks blocked out the sun. Shouting, laughing soldiers waved their machine guns from the backs of the trucks. The applause and cheers of the delirious crowd lining the street nearly drowned out the singing of Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem.

Young soldiers whistled at the tall blonde girl jumping up and down behind me. Her homemade rose petal perfume fought the stink of the diesel exhaust fumes and the stench of close-pressed sweating bodies—bodies and clothing that had not been touched by soap for years. Camouflaged tanks grumbled past, pulling long-snouted artillery. Their thunderous booming had kept me awake for several nights. Now the cannons were sniffing the air, eager to rout the enemy from the next city.

The cheers died down suddenly as a column of prisoners of war in grey-green uniforms shuffled past. The Luger pistol holsters flapped empty on their brown leather belts. They walked with their fingers laced on top of their heads. Armed Canadian soldiers walked alongside them.

The crowd silently watched the infantry prisoners go by, but then began to boo and hiss as a small column of Gestapo officers came into view. Finally! No more strutting. No more haughty looks. No more death-dealing commands. Their once-feared black uniforms glistened with the slime of saliva as people rushed from the curb to spit on them.

The last trucks in the parade rolled past. I cheered myself hoarse, and waved my little flag until a soldier snatched it out of my hand and waved it high as his truck rumbled on down the road. I tasted the salt of tears, not for the loss of the flag, but for the joy of knowing the Peace Bringers had arrived and the enemy would never make me afraid again.

Today, again, I Remember Them.