Happy Thanksgiving!

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. 

--Author Unknown

Presi­dent Abraham Lincoln

About a hundred and fifty years ago, Presi­dent Abraham Lincoln recognized what he believed was God’s hand of judgment on America “for our national perverseness and disobedience.” People were falling away from God, and Lincoln declared the first national “Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” In his 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation, he stated:

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 become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeem­ing and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.