I love Thanksgiving! I am blessed immeasurably! Every day truly ought to be a Thanksgiving Day for me. I am grateful that the United States sets aside one day each year as a national Thanksgiving holiday.
I feel thanks giving (and fellowship) deserve more emphasis on Thanksgiving. As stores seem to open earlier and earlier each year for Black Friday sales on the day after Thanksgiving, the emphasis even on Thanksgiving Day seems increasingly to be more on (often unnecessary) Christmas buying than on giving thanks. Furthermore, we may increasingly miss out on the fellowship and joy of being together with family and friends for Thanksgiving.
Of course huge numbers of us do still get together for fellowship on Thanksgiving with family and friends. Also, Thanksgiving itself does get significant media coverage. Most major news networks report each year about how busy the airports, railways, and highways are as millions of persons travel to visit family and friends for Thanksgiving. The supermarkets offer specials on turkey, cranberry sauce, and other traditional food favorites for the holiday. And the media provides human interest stories on local charities that offer free Thanksgiving meals for the homeless and poor.
It’s marvelous that Thanksgiving gets this coverage. But I would love to see us place more emphasis on our innumerable blessings.
Consider Our Blessings and Renew Relationships
Let’s focus on all the things we have to be thankful for! Despite the much publicized economic troubles, most of us in this country do have enough food to eat, safe water to drink, a comfortable place to sleep, and many other blessings that we too often take for granted. We can even be thankful for our health in most cases, which is perhaps better than we deserve due to our poor choices in diet, exercise, stress, and various risky behaviors many of us engage in.
As I stated earlier, I am blessed immeasurably! My blessings include wonderful health, tasty nutritious reasonably priced food, a nice studio efficiency apartment for shelter, comfortable and reasonably attractive clothing, two jobs I love, adequate time for rest, and fun activities that I can participate in during my leisure hours. Good friends, neighbors, and relatives are a big part of the blessings! Though I likely won’t be traveling outside Lexington, Kentucky (where I live) this Thanksgiving weekend, I did rent a car and enjoy a fabulous visit with lots of relatives and friends in southeastern Kentucky on Labor Day weekend. If you have not gotten together with friends and relatives recently and can’t for Thanksgiving, please consider trying to do so soon.
Reasonably cheap long distance phone rates, e-mail, Facebook, and other modern communication (and transportation) methods make it easier to keep up with friends and relatives than perhaps any other time in recorded human history. I’ve been blessed by numerous renewed/strengthened friendships in recent years!
Thanksgiving may be a wonderful time to contact some friends or relatives you’ve lost touch with in recent months or years! Apologize, express appreciation to them for things they did in the past, or perhaps just catch up on events since your last contact. Take time to fellowship and be thankful!
This Thanksgiving season, let’s seek to take at least a little time to be appreciative for our innumerable blessings. Even if you are experiencing various health problems, economic difficulties, or conflicts with family and friends, you can probably make a lengthy list of the blessings you have – and find they outnumber your problems. Doing so may benefit you immensely. Maybe you can even find time to volunteer a few hours for a worthy charity (or budget at least a little money to donate) — and commit to doing so even more in the future.
Let’s all seek to take at least a little time from our perhaps too busy schedules this Thanksgiving season to reflect on some of our blessings and be thankful for them. Happy Thanksgiving!