Thanksgiving

"Dad," Vince asked me the other day.  "Why is Thanksgiving in November?"

It's a good question.  Most of it has to do with Presidential edicts which initially (under Abraham Lincoln) established Thanksgiving Day as the last Thursday in November and later, under FDR switched it to the fourth Thursday in November.  The "first Thanksgiving" in Plymouth, Massachusetts was actually held in October, not November at all.

But of course, the Pilgrims didn't do Black Friday Sales either.

Regardless, the point of Thanksgiving is held in the word "thankful" and not in the timing of this holiday.  It is a time to count blessings and remember how grateful we are for the good of the last year. 

November is the time where harvest is in.  Most of us aren't farmers any more, but it is the time of year when those who make their living from the ground know whether it was a good year, an average year, or a year in which they will have their crop insurance agent on speed dial.

I'm not sure how good the harvest was this last year -- it probably depended on which part of the country you live in, but I trust that all of us can be grateful, even if it was not as plentiful as we'd like.

God is good.  He is just as good in times of want as in times of plenty.  The question is simply whether or not we can see His goodness when times are rough.

It is clear when we read of the First Thanksgiving in Plymouth Colony that the men and women who held this feast suffered much through their first year.  They had eked out a meager existence in this new land.  More than one third of their population had died that first year.  There were more new graves in the colony than there were pies at the Thanksgiving meal.  None of them knew if they would make it through the next year. They still knew that God was good.

A grateful heart thanks God for who He is, not just for what He has done.

This Thanksgiving I pray that we will spend time, not just in counting blessings, but in putting our hearts into a state of gratefulness.  Let us not focus so much on what we have been given but more on who is doing the giving.

This is the only way we can take Thanksgiving out of the fourth Thursday in November and pull it into the rest of the year.