President George Washington wrote the “Thanksgiving Proclamation” on Oct. 3, 1789, which officially established Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
The short version of that proclamation is: “To recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.”
For years Thanksgiving has been underpromoted – or is promoted only with turkey-themed merchandise – and it is extremely rare to find anything that shows gratitude to God. I believe Washington would be disappointed.
For years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government, and to get out of our lives because we wanted to be the god of our own lives. We scoff at His Ten Commandments for this reason. To teach us a life lesson He graciously complied. Maybe that is why Thanksgiving is mostly overlooked. If we are our own gods, why would we be grateful to the only true God? The question is have we had enough of the results of being our own god to ask Him to come back yet? Time will tell, but so far the answer is no.
Jesus healed 10 individuals who had leprosy or some type of infectious skin disease (Luke 17:11-19). However, only one man returned to thank Jesus for the healing. We are becoming like the other nine who didn’t. If you were Jesus how would you feel? That’s one reason why Jesus understands how you feel when people are ungrateful to you. What if God decided to show us how it would feel to stop being blessed as a test because we can’t take at least one day out of the year to show our gratitude? Maybe we are finding that out given our current state of things.
(Len Hanley lives in Barnstead.)