thanksgiving

God commanded us to "give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

After George Washington authorized the first Thanksgiving Day in 1789, 74 years passed without another such day of thanks.  Then Abraham Lincoln established the holiday as an annual event in American life.  His Thanksgiving Proclamation is worth reading again today:

"It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scripture and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten God.  We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God 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 as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."

When did President Lincoln authorize our annual Thanksgiving Day?  In 1863 - in the midst of the Civil War.

Hard places and hard times are the best times to be thankful.  For then we open our lives to the God who alone can bless and prosper us.  He cannot give us what we will not receive.  An attitude of gratitude is essential to receiving the grace and favor of our heavenly Father.  And it is appropriate in thanks for his every blessing, given now and in eternity.