Choosing Gratitude: 30 Day Challenge: Day 25

Day 25: Thanksgiving Day
Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 8:1-10

Historians have differing perspectives in relation to the first Thanksgiving celebrations in America.  But there are some details we know for sure to be true.  We know that the Pilgrims' journey from Holland to England to the New World was frightfully difficult, with sickness and storms their frequent visitors on the arduous, weeks-long voyage.  We know that once they arrived, the task of carving dwellings out of the forest quick enough to hold back the advancing effects of winter was a losing race against time.  Nearly half of those who made the trip didn't survive the stay.  The Pilgrims certainly built more graves than huts.

And yet with sheer survival the order of each day, and with fears for their families an all-consuming worry, their writings and recorded history are filled with demonstrations and attitudes of thanksgiving.

Each Sunday--from the first landing of the  Mayflower through the subsequent years of their little colony, in lean times as well as relatively plentiful--they gathered for prayer, mediation, the th singing of hymns, an da servon.  It was their regular practice to stop and give thanks to God at the outset of each week.

Though having to be restricted to half-rations when their stores of crops proved insufficient for the first, long winters, William Bradford commented that they were learning by experience "the turth of the word in Deuteronomy 8:3--that man lives no by bread alone, but by every word that procedds out of the mouth of the Lord."

And when the years began slowly bringing a renewed abundance of harvests, rather than telling God they could manage just fine by themselves from here on, Edward Winslow worte, "Having these many signs of God's favor and [acceptance], we thought it would be a great ingratitude if secretly we should content ourselves iwth private thanksgiving....Therefore, another solemn day [referring back to a day of prayer and fasting they had observed earlier in the summer] was set apart and appointed for that end; wherein we returned glory, honor, and praise, with all thankfulness to our God who dealt so graciously wiht us."

What a wonderful example those early Pilgrims provide of choosing gratitude in times of plenty and times of want!

GRATITUDE IN ACTION
User your prayer time today to think back over the history of God's faithfulness in your life, your family, and your church.  Make a list of desperate situations or seasons when you have witnessed His providential protection and provision.