Find Your Thankfulness

The First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1899) – Wikipedia.

Thankfulness is the expression of gratitude and we really do have so much to be thankful for.  Has life brought us difficulties? Yes. Have we suffered pain and injustices? Yes.  Has the winter season in our lives been too long and harsh, absolutely yes!

I don’t think we can really imagine what that First Thanksgiving was like. What started out with hardship, two separate people groups and suspicion, came a coming together,  a mutual respect and a partnership with the Wampanoag people.  Unfortunately, what followed generations later would not always foster the same goodwill or thankfulness.

Recently, however, Euchee Indian Negiel Bigpond coordinated the first-ever national prayer gathering of Native Americans on October 21, 2016.  1,000 Native American Indian tribes from the United States and Canada descended on the National Mall in Washington D. C. to collectively forgive the past injustices by the U.S. government for breaking treaties with their ancestors. In their Voices of Vision, they state, “We repent of every curse spoken over America by our ancestors and we release the power of forgiveness to bring healing and the peace of Creator God to this land.”

If anyone has a right not be thankful today, it would be our Native American friends.  Yet they are thankful AND they are also forgiving.  Let’s follow the example of this great people and nations to find our thankfulness, because forgiveness, and thanksgiving brings with it hope and health.  May this same spirit of thankfulness penetrate your home and heart today as we reflect on the goodness of the “Beneficent Father” as Abraham Lincoln recalled in his Civil War 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation and which seems just as appropriate today:

 It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.  I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning 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 interposition of the almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.   OCTOBER 3, 1863  Abraham Lincoln.