Most of us are familiar with the traditional story of Thanksgiving where William Bradford, of Plymouth Rock, proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the survival of the Pilgrims in their second year in the New World, as well as an abundant harvest that they had reaped with the aid of the Indians.
However, most people don’t know that the first American Thanksgiving didn’t occur in 1621 with this group of Pilgrims who shared a feast with a group of friendly Indians. The first recorded thanksgiving actually took place in Virginia more than 11 years earlier, and it wasn’t a feast.
The winter of 1610 at Jamestown had reduced a group of 409 settlers to 60. The survivors prayed for help, without knowing when or how it might come. When help arrived, in the form of a ship filled with food and supplies from England, a prayer meeting was held to give thanks to God.
You would think that after seeing so many of their loved ones die due to the hardships of the New World, they would not feel that thankful. However, the opposite was true. They realized they had much to be thankful for.
We often don’t realize how blessed we are, or how thankful we ought to be, until what we have is threatened to be taken away. It is good and fitting that as Christians, we ought to celebrate Thanksgiving for God has certainly been good to every singular one of us.
Someone once said that gratitude is the source for all other Christian virtues. If that be the case, then perhaps we need to reason that ingratitude may well be the source of all, or at least many of our faults as well.
When we begin to take for granted what God has done for us, then we become calloused and filled with pride and then God can no longer use us. For a Christian, every day ought to be a day of thanksgiving.
So, like the first Thanksgiving, may we be thankful for God’s blessings.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks