Dear Friends:
Many people trace the American Thanksgiving back to the Pilgrims sitting down to Turkey and Cranberry Dinner with the Native American Wampanoag nation in Plymouth, MA in 1620. However, the official observance of Thanksgiving stemmed from a mandate from one of America’s greatest leaders and presidents, Abraham Lincoln. He reminds us of the True Source of blessing and healing. He decreed this holiday during the worst crisis in American history, in the darkest days of the Civil War.
October 3, 1863, Proclamation of the President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln:
“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 next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and union.”
In the year of our Lord 2020, during a once-in-one-hundred-year pandemic, a polarizing political campaign and election unlike any other, and the specter of long food lines, we welcome his words encouraging to us to turn to God for healing and renewal. We do so with great confidence, knowing that we are all in God’s hands and He never disappoints.
I hope and pray that you and your near and dear ones will have a joyful, happy, and safe Thanksgiving. May God rain down his abundant blessings on you and them.
Please remember Venerable Patrick Peyton’s poignant sayings, “The family that prays together stays together” and “A world at prayer is a world at peace.”
