Thanksgiving tomorrow. I doubt I’ll post anything that day, as I’ll have family prowling the place like roaring lions, seeking what they may devour. Tomorrow morning comes my annual D-Day, when I face the challenge of roasting a turkey. I’ve done this four straight years now with unbroken success, but I still feel incompetent.

What am I thankful for? There’s a question to make me guilty. “A pack o’ blessings lie on my head,” to paraphrase Romeo and Juliet, and yet I spend most of my life (as you may have noticed) bemoaning the things (some of them quite important, you have to admit) that I’ve missed out on.

But I’ll tell you one thing I’m thankful for. It’s this.

Tip: Conservative Grapevine.

I love this stuff. A walking wheelchair—a way for paraplegics to enjoy a more normal life. A way to regenerate damaged spinal tissue would be better, of course, but I think we’ll have that too, before long. (And I’d bet you money it will be through a method that doesn’t involve embryonic stem cells.)

I think things like this are part of (note I said, “part of”) the answer to the question of theodicy—“If God is good, why is there so much suffering in the world?” If you’re wondering why God isn’t doing anything about suffering, I say He’s doing this. He’s working through people to overcome suffering and evil, which is a more glorious thing than starting out with perfection.

That leaves lots of questions, of course. Plenty of undeserved suffering goes unrelieved in this world. I don’t have the answer to the whole question. I’m just saying this seems to me a hint, a relevant fact.

And I would note (because I can’t help myself) that this happened in Israel, a country within the western tradition. Obfuscate all you like, but the great non-western civilizations never came up with the kind of science that does this sort of thing. The machines may be manufactured in Japan or China, but left to nothing but Shintoism or Taoism, those cultures would have gone on until the heat death of the universe without developing the scientific method and modern medicine. Because they don’t believe in a God who made a real world out of nothing, as Christians and Jews do. That doctrine made the examination of nature a praiseworthy thing, rather than blasphemy. It was Christians, who believe that physical matter was made noble in the Incarnation, who figured out thoracic surgery and penicillin.

And for that I’m thankful.