There are two ways to make your Thanksgiving holiday family time together perfect this week. One way to make it perfect is to have your family not spend any time together. Really. Where two or three are gathered together, there is disagreement in their midst. This is merely “perfect” in the sense of free from strife, though that is probably an imperfect definition of perfect. When we as Christians think about perfect we usually think about what is as good as it could possibly be.

So if not getting together is not an option, and if getting together necessarily leads to some level of relational strife, how could there possibly be a way to make it “perfect”?

Paul wrote this:

bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:13-14)

There are no perfect holidays that are free from strife, from stress, from criticisms, from sin. But there can be perfect harmony, even when sin snaps at the kids, the kids keep needling each other, the in-laws complain about the one dish that isn’t on the table of seventeen other things you made. The harmony happens when Christians absorb the heat.

You have two ways to respond when the steaming gravy gets spilled on you. You can be like a pile of fluffy mashed potatoes, soaking up the gravy from making an even bigger mess, or you can be like a dried out piece of turkey with crisp skin because it was cooked five hours too long. You can blame everyone else and leave the mess for them, or you can absorb it, as God’s chosen ones.

Be the person for whom others eagerly give thanks.