Our Thanksgiving Week Begins
Awww…..beautiful Thanksgiving Week — the time we really focus on God’s multiplied blessings to us. Though it’s the mindset we should have all year through, this week we purposely hone in on what’s most important to us. I’m in “game-on” mode for all that this week will hold.
But, before I go to that high energy “Martha” mode, I have to pause this morning, in these wee hours and settle into the “Mary” mode to reflect on the beauty of what this upcoming holiday is all about. First of all, I am so grateful that America continues to set apart a day each year for giving thanks. Whew! That’s a close one! Aren’t we so grateful that the “radicals” that keep trying to remove the values that our country was founded upon — prayer, Christmas, “In God We Trust” and “The 10 Commandments” and other matters that exclude our Sovereign God, haven’t been successful with removing Thanksgiving? And I think it’s a double blessing that most of us still believe that Thanksgiving is a day for actually giving thanks to God, not just a time for feeling vaguely thankful while loading up on turkey and pumpkin pie, watching football AND perusing all the Black Friday ads!
May we not forget the heart of Thanksgiving. In fact, it may seem like a cliche, but I believe Thanksgiving should be a part of our DNA where that spirit of gratitude is at the very core of our lives. Just being grateful to wake up in a warm bed. In fact, being grateful we WOKE UP — considering the alternative. Grateful to be vertical — not horizontal. And, the list could go into pages for so many other blessings we have.
Thinking about this wonderful holiday, I did a little research on how it started. On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation inviting citizens of the United States to “set apart and observe the last Thursday of November, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” His act established Thanksgiving as a national event. Thanksgiving that year was celebrated on November. 26, one week after Lincoln’s trip to a small Pennsylvania town, where he memorialized the fallen in one of the Civil War’s most critical and devastating battles. With bodies still lying unburied in the fields behind him, Lincoln asked the nation to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” And with those words, Lincoln rewrote America’s political lineage. He traced the nation’s birth to the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, instead of the Constitution, which allowed slavery to exist. During the four years of the Civil War, more than 620,000 people would die — 2% of the population. Nearly everyone who survived the war was touched by it in some way.
Even amid such profound sorrow, Lincoln found the reason to give thanks. It all bears repeating, but for the sake of space here, I simply offer the last paragraph. We might ask this question: “What would happen if an American President used this kind of language again in an official proclamation? How could the tide change for our country if our nation turned its heart toward God again?
President Lincoln finishes his proclamation with: “I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union. In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the City of Washington, this 3rd day of October, A. D. 1863.”
Happy Thanksgiving, my precious FB friends!
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD…..” Psalm 33:12