Thanksgiving is a time to be with our friends and families, to give thanks and reflect on all of the blessings that have been bestowed upon us throughout our lives here on this earth.  As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, let us give thanks to our Lord and Savior, for loving us even though we are all sinners.  Let us give thanks for being born in the greatest country to ever exist, for our rights and for our freedoms.  We give thanks for the good times in our country and also the bad.  For through the bad, we learn many lessons that help us become better people and move our country closer to becoming a more perfect union.

Over the last ten years our country has experienced many struggles.  We have become more divided, it seems, on every issue put forth.  However, this week we will all sit down and break bread with the people we love from all different walks of life. We will come together knowing that our beliefs, politically, socially, and economically, may not be the same, but as human beings and children of God, we are all one.  One race, one people and one Nation. It would do us all well to spend a minute reading the words of one of the greatest Presidents this nation has ever known.  Through the most destructive times our country has ever seen, he saw the goodness in its people.  He knew that despite our differences, and despite the bloodshed, we were all brothers and sisters in Christ and our country would prevail if we turned from our wicked ways and back to God.  I urge you to read and take to heart his words this Thanksgiving.

Washington, D.C.

October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

The year that is drawing towards its closes, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.  To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battlefield; and the county, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.  No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.  It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.  I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.  And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

                                                                       –Abraham Lincoln

(6 weeks prior to the gettysburg address)

May you all have a blessed Thanksgiving.