For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal live. John 3:16 (NIV)

In 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving to which they invited the Wampanoags, a native American tribe, who had helped them settle and plant new crops in the new land. Back in the second millennium before Christ, the Israelites were also trying to settle in a new land.

Deuteronomy 26 gives instructions to the Israelites and to us, God's children, on how to be thankful to God. When we come to worship God, we offer the best of what we have: our time, our talent, our resources. When we pray, our hearts swell with gratitude to God even though we may have experienced hardships and oppressions in the past. When we gather to celebrate the Thanksgiving meal, we are moved to live out the true spirit of thanksgiving by inviting those who are less fortunate than us to share in this celebratory time....more...

Well, here we are in the middle of another Thanksgiving season.

Although the holiday is supposed to be a time to give thanks for all our blessings, most of us wind up just stuffing (excuse the pun) ourselves with food and falling asleep in front of the TV watching football.

What if we not only gave real thanks on Thanksgiving but also had an attitude of gratitude throughout the year?

Singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, one of my all-time favorites, has described the way we limit our focus on gratitude to one time of year.

In an interview, he said, "Remember in school how, at Thanksgiving, we would be asked to bring in cans of food, etc., for hungry people? Just imagine if, one year, a teacher had the guts to say, `Children, it was the single most wonderful outpouring of generosity this school has ever seen. More cans of food than ever before, feeding hundreds of families, were donated.

We only have one problem, and we are going to deal with it this coming week. We're going to cancel our regular classes and what we are going to talk about is: What are those people going to eat next week?!?'

"Doesn't it sound like a sensible education system that dealt with questions like that?"
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