The Sunday Mail
As I was compiling this week’s message, from where I attended service, God put me to reflect and remember the celebration of Thanksgiving. What I originally thought were the origins of Thanksgiving and what I got to learn in the process of researching on left me on edge.
I beg you, dear reader, to allow me to break my routine this week and share with you my views on giving thanks or in this case “Thanksgiving”, a day whose origins can be traced mainly to the United States of America and Canada.
This day is usually celebrated on the last Thursday of November in America and the second Monday of October in Canada.
According to some accounts, in mid-winter 1620 the English ship the Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 exiles. The original native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been exterminated because six years earlier a British expedition had landed there.
“When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 per cent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely,” one account says.
The Europeans built a colony they called “the Plymouth Plantation” near the ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They lived on the abandoned cornfields.
Only one Indian, Squanto, had survived and he taught the colonisers how to plant maize and catch fish until the first harvest. He also helped them negotiate a peace treaty with the nearby Wampanoag people led by Chief Massasoit.
The settlers survived their first year and John Winthrop – a founder of the Massachusetts Bay colony – considered this to be a divine miracle. In celebration of their good fortune, the colony’s governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast of “thanksgiving” after the first harvest of 1621.
So yes, America’s Thanksgiving day is really a celebration of colonialism.
But there is a purer “thanksgiving” and this is found in the Bible.
Psalms 100:4 (KJV) tells us the pass to enter God’s gates is through giving thanks.
“Enter with the password thank you. Make yourselves at home, talking praise. Thank him. Worship him.”
How many things are you trying to unlock in your life but you are using the wrong password?
You would rather utter complaints, drop tears, express anger or bitterness instead of a mere thank you.
While God also speaks of giving thanks in Leviticus 7:12-15 and 22:29, I especially took a liking to the message from Psalms 26:7 which says, “I scrub my hands with purest soap, then join hands with the others in the great circle, dancing around your altar, God, singing God-songs at the top of my lungs, telling God-stories.”
As a country, how many God stories have we told this year?
Have we not been complaining left, right and centre, and chosen not to see the God stories around us?
When you look at Nigeria, where acts of violence and abductions have terrorised the nation, do you not see a God story in Zimbabwe? Or in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea where people are losing as many as four family members at once due to the Ebola virus are you yet to see a God story in Zimbabwe?
Yes everything might not be rosy, and you like me could have lost a lot and more; but thanksgiving is a sacrifice according to Jonah 2:9 and Psalms 107:22.
It’s not easy to do so in times of pain.
Time and space can fail me in narrating the events in Kenya, Syria and the Middle East where in some of these areas holding a Bible is a risk to ones’ life. But does the fact that we are not willing to exchange places with any of the people in the nations I mentioned above mean not mean that we are blessed? Let not the troubles we have faced this year steal away the “thank you” we ought to give to God and in the process stop us from unlocking the gate of God’s greater plans.
A closer look reveals that we have gained more than we have lost. Matthew 16:26 says “what can a man give in exchange for his soul?”
I have made a choice that I will give thanks to God even through gritted teeth, in joy and in pain, because that’s my password through God’s gate which I so desperately want to enter. This week why don’t you find someone to thank for what they have contributed to your life.
Even your enemy I know he has been a springboard to your success. If that enemy had not awoken you from your slumber you would be poor in your comfort zone and not as strong as you are today.
While you do so, meditate on Colossians 2:7, 2 Corinthians 4:15,Jeremiah 30:19, Isaiah 51:3, Psalms 50:14, 69: 30, 95:2 and thank God that he has really been good to you. Until next week watch out for The Sunday Mail at your place of worship. In addition keep living a victorious life through the grace of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
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