Psalm 100:4: Thanks at the Gate

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.

Psalm 100:4 (NIV)

Thanks at the Gate

Nine words, the same nine, before anybody picks up a fork. She learned them off her grandmother, who did not explain them and did not vary them, and she has said them at that table for forty years in the same voice she uses to ask whether anyone wants more.

She says them on the Saturday after the funeral, with two fewer people at the table than there were in June, and nothing in her voice does anything different. Nobody looks up. The boy at the end is already reaching.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, give thanks to him and praise his name. God is good, his love endures forever, and his faithfulness continues through all generations. He made the people walking in, and they’re his, the sheep of his pasture.

So thanksgiving is the way in, and on the other side of that gate stands a God who was good before the first person thought to say so. He’s good whether the thanks comes easily that morning or has to be said flat, and his faithfulness runs through all generations either way. God tells people how to come in, and he says nothing at all about how they’ll feel once they’re through.

I can tell you what giving thanks does to a morning, and I’ve watched it happen. Why God asks to be met at the gate with it is a question I can follow a certain distance and then no further.

The next Saturday the boy says it before she can, and gets one word wrong. Nobody corrects him, and nobody tells him he did well either. He says it again the week after that, the same way, with the same word wrong.