Living Thanksgiving

Many many years ago at the first recorded Thanksgiving in 1621, something very special happened. The pilgrims had formed an alliance with the last Indian left from the Patuxet tribe, Squanto. Squanto was instrumental in the survival of the pilgrims and helped provide guidance in how to grow crops of food to survive. In simple words, rivals found a way to work together.

As our recent Presidential Election shows, we not only have rivals in foreign countries, but we are in some ways still fighting an internal Civil War in this country, though the boundaries and types of people have changed. The divisions among us have already cost us much as for 8 years no one cooperated with the elected President, and now it looks like we are in for another 4 years at least of continued severe division.

There is a lesson we can learn from those pilgrims and indians. They were all in the same country, and they decided to work together to resolve their differences instead of fighting over them. Turned out, the harvest became plentiful and our nation grew. In even more simpler words, they were Living Thanksgiving!

What was the thing Jesus spoke of over and over again? Yes grace, mercy, forgiveness and love of God. But there was much about loving our fellow man and living in unity. Why so? Because a nation unified with as many resources as God has blessed us with is an undivided nation, under God with liberty and justice for all.

Or, we can be a nation of separatists, divided always by our demands to be unique and selfish in our needs, and soon our foreign enemies can just walk into this country without firing a shot and take us down. As a Viet Nam vet I saw how united our enemy was and how divided we became in the US. And we saw that once we hit that point of no return, it was a walkover. Only one problem, 50,000 thousand young men and women died for literally nothing.

My point, God is always about making things work in the human race rather than making chaos. To do so, we must look to him as the unifier and pray continually that we understand what has made us great in the past is being one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

One leader doesn't make it that way, we do as the American people. That would really be Living Thanksgiving!