PEA RIDGE — I look on Thanksgiving as one of the greater holidays that we as a people celebrate. It may not be quite as great as Christmas or Easter, the church festivals which celebrate events at the heart of our Christian faith, but Thanksgiving is a very Christian thing to do.
I’m looking to a scripture in Ephesians 5:18-20, “... be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.” How unusual is this call for a positive, expectant and grateful way of life in the midst of the pessimism and negativisms of our day!
I’m also reminded of the great beginning of Psalm 103, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name!
Bless the Lord, O my Soul, and forget not all his benefits!” These scriptures lift up an important thing to be noted about thanksgiving as a way of living and responding to life’s circumstances. That is, giving thanks arises out of a relationship to a Holy God. It wells up out of the depths of a healthy, hearty soul. It is not so much aroused by the overabundance of the things we possess, but by a heart tuned for appreciation, for a shared experience of grace and love and power in God’s spirit, and a vision of life trained on the goodness of God.
The sentiment of thanksgiving, and the celebration of life in the spirit of thanksgiving, of course goes far back in the human history. It shines throughout the Bible. Christians from the beginning have given thanks for life in Christ and have continued to do so throughout the ages. Thanksgiving is a great heritage which our generation receives, and is challenged to perpetuate and to pass on to those who come after us.
One of the great focal points in our American heritage of Thanksgiving is the 1621 harvest feast celebrated in the Plymouth Colony in 1621, drawing together 53 colonists and 90 Wampanoag Indians.
The winter of 1620-21 was a heavy hardship for the colonists, Puritans, with much suffering and loss of life.
With the help of the neighboring Native Americans, the colonists had endured the winter’s challenges, and in the fall of 1621 they were bringing in a harvest, counting their blessings and experiencing a great refreshment of hope for thefuture in their new home.
I am often struck by our day’s inclination to complain and to expect the worst, even while we are among the world’s most blessed peoples. We are abundantly blessed with food, so much that overeating becomes a problem and an ailment; we are abundantly blessed with great cars to travel in, great airlines to carry us all over the world, great communication technologies, TVs, iPads, smart phones, personal digital assistants, the World Wide Web, and on and on. People seem to be on the way to assuming that everybody just expects all that abundance, not with an appreciation that we are abundantly blessed, but with an attitude of taking it all for granted, without appreciation.
I believe our scriptures quoted above describe a thanksgiving that springs from an appreciative heart, a heart alive and inspired by the Spirit of Christ within. It is more than a spontaneous heartfelt feeling. It is attitude, a way of responding to life’s opportunities, shaped by the creative work of the Spirit of God, stirring the soul and shaping the mindset, those depths of the soul out of which the wellsprings of our life bubble up with a bounty of spirit and vitality. There is such a difference between being taught to say thank you as a polite and proper thing to do, and being taught to be appreciative, to learn to know that we are blessed, to acknowledge our blessings and to be grateful for our blessings.
Our nation’s custom of celebrating a Thanksgiving holiday in November was established in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln. What an amazing time to be calling for a spirit of thanksgiving! What gloomy circumstances out of which to be looking forward to greater things to come, trusting in God’s providence! Should not we, as a people, now be calling on our nation to show such a spirit of thanksgiving?
◊◊◊
Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
News, Pages 2 on 11/21/2012