Thanksgiving Day and After

This week our nation will observe two important days. One day will be a day when we remember what price the Pilgrims paid in coming to this country. The Pilgrims were the Puritan pioneers who came to America for religious liberty and barely survived those first years. Half of them died in the first several months. By the help of Indians, the tenacity of faith and God’s grace, some did survive and gathered around the new foods (corn, squash, and perhaps a turkey) of this great new land and gave thanks to God. In the same tradition of what our Pilgrim forefathers acknowledged as the providential blessings of God, we will gather with family, friends and neighbors around a splendid feast to give thanks. Some will volunteer at soup kitchens, work at homeless shelters and give out dinners to the lost and the lonely. On this day a nation will in some degree show its best side and recall a history of what once made us a “nation under God.”
Then the day after, in what has been called “Black Friday”, the retailers and shopping centers will be anticipating the busiest shopping day of the year. The hope of the economic future is in many ways measured by the “success” of this day. What a contrast from the day of thanks and remembrance of God’s provision. Yet isn’t that the way the human heart responds to God? We are so fickle and forgetful in our commitments. What we need is not another warm feeling of nostalgia – a fond memory about the days of old.

Say not, "Why were the former days better than these?"
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.

Eccles. 7:10 (ESV) What we need is a transformation of our hearts in the present that will bear fruit of new obedience for the future. Like true repentance, true thanksgiving reveals a pattern of a new and different kind of life. What will you do on Friday, may in fact reflect what you did in your heart on Thursday. Just think about it.
Happy Thanksgiving Day in all light of God’s grace.
Pastor Todd Baucum