SMOKE SIGNALS [A Thanksgiving Commentary] Pray –Just Pray by Margaret Figert

Thanksgiving week brings nostalgia when, once upon a time, food, feasting and fun were on nearly every family’s agenda.

The 1943 Norman Rockwell painting entitled “Freedom From Want” portrays this picture perfectly – grandpa standing at the head of the table wearing a black suit, white shirt and tie; a white-aproned bespectacled grandma setting a 25-lb. (give or take) roasted turkey cradled on a white platter onto a white tablecloth, her green frock almost matching the green dining room wallpaper; several stalks of celery coupled with pickles on relish trays; a mold of gelled cranberry sauce; old-fashioned silver-plated salt and pepper shakers; family sitting at the table and laughing in anticipation and an uncle, perhaps, looking sideways at the camera in the painting’s far right bottom corner.

Today’s elders will remember Rockwell’s talent. After a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, middle-agers may spend Thanksgiving afternoon watching football on TV. Teens are welded to their phones, youngsters are outdoors shooting hoops if temperatures permit, while babies are burped and laid down for a nap. The turkey’s tryptophan may induce sleep in elders too.

Many families will invite single relatives and friends to their feasting. Other singles may eat alone, their families either living far away or, sadly, perhaps nonexistent.

In New York City, on October 3, 1789, the United States of America’s first president, George Washington, proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a “day of publick thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” The rest of Pres. Washington’s Thanksgiving Day proclamation is interesting. Read about it at https://www.yahoo.com/news/george-washington-used-first-thanksgiving-151043636.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall

On October 3, 1863, Pres. Abraham Lincoln followed Washington’s lead when he wrote his Thanksgiving Day proclamation to say: “It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.” [Honest Abe, despite his serious illness of tyranny, did have a way with words and spoke the truth sometimes.]  Download https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/transcript_for_abraham_lincoln_thanksgiving_proclamation_1863.pdf for the full proclamation.

Pres. Lincoln went on to lament that, though citizens have “been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God…” [Definitely truth regarding forgetting, even if not about “peace.”]

It makes one shudder at the thought of how many modern Americans have forgotten God, don’t realize how their unacknowledged blessings came about and don’t understand why they should be grateful for and obedient to God’s laws which are designed to save their thick hides from premature death and destruction.

Civil war calls our nation today. We’ve just elected a president who enjoyed a landslide win at November 5’s polls because, among other proposed corrections and improvements, he essentially promised to bring justice for the severe government malfeasance from which our nation’s people have suffered. Yet, the outgoing party retains a fear of earned justice that invites the incoming party to wield it.

Our nation’s future is as much, if not more, about spiritual warfare as it is about justice. Already, though the incoming president-elect hasn’t even been inaugurated and seated in the Oval Office, people of opposite beliefs continue to wage war against him.

Even so, Trump’s life continues to be threatened by Iran, meaning he’s not out of the woods yet. Knowing this commands continuing prayer by Christians and non-Christians worldwide for Trump’s and his family’s safety and the safety of his future cabinet members and their families.

Trump’s life is as fragile as ours. An old newshen like me from Nebraska can’t protect him and, unless you’re working for the Secret Service, neither can you. Thus, we really must pray and keep praying for our loving God to use Trump in moving our nation forward into goodness, justice, truth and, as the late Rev. Noah Broken Leg was fond of saying, into “loving-kindness.”

Pray, too, for a change of heart and mind in Trump’s and America’s enemies so they lose the scales off their spiritual eyes and enter the light of God’s absolute law of love and justice: What goes around, comes around – what one gives, one gets.

While you’re praying, thank God for your many blessings.

Thank Him for eyes that see. Blind people wish they could.

Thank Him for ears that hear. Deaf people miss so much of life unless they wear hearing aids, a treasured device my grandparents couldn’t even dream about.

Thank Him for your senses of smell and taste, without which the traditional turkey dinner is just so much bland food.

Can you walk and run? How many American soldiers are wearing artificial limbs because their arms or legs were blown off during wars?

Thank God for creating your brain and mind so that you can think, reason, memorize and apply the knowledge you need to earn a paycheck.

Above all, thank God for living in a nation where you are still free to speak your mind, offer your opinion, peacefully debate your differences and worship the God of love, justice and goodness.

Consider the kind of tyranny where men can stone adulterous women to death but wink at the man who took her, where women aren’t allowed to vote or drive a vehicle or must cover everything but their eyes in public.

The U.S. is still behind socially among those men who consider women as mere property, subject to their every narcissistic whim. We’re also behind in failing to distinguish the difference between teaching and fairly disciplining our children and beating them into obedience.

We are way, way behind in valuing unborn children, especially among those who see pregnancy as an inconvenience and abortion as a birth-control method. Why haven’t these men and women learned about the satisfying glories of guilt-free abstinence until marriage?

Let’s also thank God for His grace and mercy when we seriously mess up and hurt ourselves and others wrongly and often unnecessarily. He forgives all sins except one. Find it at Matthew 12: 22-32 and Mark 3: 22-30.

Pray for rain and for God to give you wisdom. It’s found on the path to heaven.

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2024/11/27/smoke-signals-a-thanksgiving-commentary-pray-just-pray-by-margaret-figert/