Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Today let's not worry about pilgrims and Indians (or is it Native Americans?) and instead focus on giving Thanks for all the blessings He has bestown upon us. As we prepare to glut ourselves on food today, remember those who will go hungry. We live in a country where we have our choice of turkeys (organic, free range, small or large) and the aisles of our supermarkets are filled with non essential items (cookies, crackers, soda, etc.) Tons of pounds of wheat, corn and other raw foods are used to make these junk foods and we still have the audacity to gripe when we can't find the exact brand and flavor of cracker at our local grocer. (What? No low fat, dipping size, garlic and rosemary Triscuts?!) There are people in our own country who wouldn't give a damn what flavor of Triscut you gave them so long as they had food. There are people in the developing world who would just be happy to get a pound of flour to make their own crackers. I knew of an African family who after relocating to Syracuse had to take a local friend from church shopping with them because they were so overwhelmed by all the choices and had no idea what foods they really needed. Heck, my husband is overwhelmed when I send him to get lasagna noodles. He brings back one of each to make sure I get the right thing. Needless to say, my pantry is full of lasagna noodles.
We have grown complacent in our prosperity. When we don't have a endless assortment of food to choose from, we feel robbed. My mom will be making no less than four types of side dishes today (I managed to talk her down from five) in order to give everyone in my family what they want. We will have at least four desserts. In celebrating our bounty, we've slipped into gluttony, something we should never be thankful for. Today, enjoy your feast which your wife, mom, or grandmother, slaved over a hot stove to make for you but maybe, fast the rest of the day or don't get seconds or skip dessert. Better yet, do all three. Take leftovers and eat them all week like they were the only food you had. Take the money you saved and give it to a food pantry or homeless person. Most importantly, remember to give thanks, today and everyday for the blessings God has given you. I leave you with Abraham Lincoln.

President Abraham Lincoln 1863

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 scriptures
and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the
Lord.
We know that by divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to
punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justify fear that the
awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment
inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national
reformation as a whole people?
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.