Much to offer thanks for

Have you ever thought of what Thanksgiving means to you? I know for one, I’m often guilty of not practicing Thanksgiving enough in my life and the lifestyle in America doesn’t make it any easier.

We can fill our Thanksgiving season with activities, ballgames and food and miss the true meaning of Thanksgiving, which is giving thanks to our Creator for all the many blessings He has bestowed on us.

Romans 1 gives readers a glimpse of the pathway to a nation that turns away from God and the first step (verse 21) is to become ungrateful to God. We should realize God needs us to stop occasionally and realize all we have comes from His hand of bounty and He expects us to acknowledge that through Thanksgiving. The very word Thanksgiving means we recognize gratitude for something someone has given us and ultimately this someone is the Creator God in Heaven.

Of the 102 people that sailed on the original Mayflower to come to America, 50 died within the first winter and spring. That spring the Mayflower sailed back to England and gave those early settlers the opportunity to travel back, yet none chose to do so. Miraculously an English-speaking Indian showed up in the camp that first spring and begin teaching these settlers how to fish and hunt and plant crops. He taught them plants they could use for medicines.

By fall, they had a bountiful harvest but after such hardship, many would expect them to turn away from God. Yet these Pilgrims chose to hold close to God and set aside three days to offer Thanksgiving to Him. While early settlers practiced times of thanksgiving, it was several years after the forming of our nation Thanksgiving became a time set aside for all Americans to observe our thankfulness to God.

Our first order of thanks, to me, is gratitude for my health, for my family, and of all places on earth where God chose to allow me to be born and live, I never drive through our beautiful community that I don’t Thank Him for placing my family and me right here.

Growing up, I can say I never heard a curse word in our home, nor did I ever hear an argument. I grew up in a day we could leave our doors unlocked, our windows open and go off for a day and never worry. It was a time you went to the grocery store and left your keys in the ignition and your windows down on a hot day.

School days started with reading from the Bible and prayer and the Ten Commandments were visibly posted as the underlying basis of conduct in our nation. A flag was in every classroom and we pledged allegiance to it every morning. I don’t remember in early years having a single student in my class that came from what we called a broken home.

It was only about 100 years ago that Rogersville even paved our streets, ran water and electricity into local homes and most of America were just beginning to see cars and airplanes. In such a short period of time, telephones came along, then televisions and several years after I was married computers came on the market. Phones you held in your hand was just a story in the comic strip Dick Tracy.

Do we often think, in just the generations of the last 100 years, what we have to be thankful for? If you got up this morning and had heat, flipped a switch and had lights, turned a handle to get water, found a little room where you could use the restroom inside rather than outside, open a door to a cooling machine we call a refrigerator, and go to a closet with more clothes than you know what to do with, we can begin counting our many blessings and naming them one by one as the old song goes.

That’s before we leave the house, get into a car for every member of the family, go to a workplace which is also heated with lights and bathrooms and offers an opportunity to earn income for your family. You can drive on a paved road to a grocery store and find what the kings of the world didn’t have available just 100 years ago.

And not only do we have all this at our fingertips, but most people who live on the earth could never imagine having what even lower income Americans have and most who are unappreciative they don’t have more.

Can we all be conscious this year of all these things have been provided to us from God? In our home we put up a poster board on the wall every November and family members wrote things we were grateful for. On Thanksgiving we spent time before our Thanksgiving dinner was served, in prayer offering thanks to God for our many blessings we had written down.

And as you think of our next holiday season, you might put in the center of that poster board one large word, the word for the name of a person born in a tiny obscure village halfway around the world 2,000 years ago, that gave us our biggest reason to offer thanks and that is that our sins can be forgiven and after this flicker of existence on this amazing planet God created, we have the promise of an eternal home in heaven. And that single word is JESUS.