Thanksgiving Message
Thanksgiving is coming! When I think of Thanksgiving, I think of Pilgrims, Native Americans, turkey (with fixings) pies, and family. It is a celebration, and when appropriately observed, it has that sense humility as we ponder all that has come to us. The legend is that the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest in Plymouth by gathering to offer thanks to God for all they had received.
I wonder how many of us realize what the Pilgrims had been through in that first year in the New World. They had left Europe on creaky wooden ships, bound for a place they had never seen and could only imagine. The trip was stormy and dangerous. Not all completed the journey. They landed in a place where the soil was rocky and hard to till. They had to hunt for food with muskets. With bare hands and few tools, they built rude houses. Worst of all, they suffered from disease which killed half of them. After all of this, they took time to thank God with grateful hearts.
The deeper meaning of Thanksgiving is not so much thanking God for the bounty of our lives. Rather it is learning to live our lives with grateful hearts no matter what our circumstances. To have a grateful heart is to be open to all that life offers, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the happy and the sad. To have a grateful heart is a way of being in the world; it is not an act we must perform. Life, itself, is the gift and being able to live that gift in a community of caring folks is a blessing. May we observe this Thanksgiving with open, loving, and grateful hearts, and may we offer a prayer for this community at Fisk Memorial United Methodist Church that it might continue to be a blessed communion.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Rev. Rick Black
Thanksgiving is coming! When I think of Thanksgiving, I think of Pilgrims, Native Americans, turkey (with fixings) pies, and family. It is a celebration, and when appropriately observed, it has that sense humility as we ponder all that has come to us. The legend is that the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest in Plymouth by gathering to offer thanks to God for all they had received.
I wonder how many of us realize what the Pilgrims had been through in that first year in the New World. They had left Europe on creaky wooden ships, bound for a place they had never seen and could only imagine. The trip was stormy and dangerous. Not all completed the journey. They landed in a place where the soil was rocky and hard to till. They had to hunt for food with muskets. With bare hands and few tools, they built rude houses. Worst of all, they suffered from disease which killed half of them. After all of this, they took time to thank God with grateful hearts.
The deeper meaning of Thanksgiving is not so much thanking God for the bounty of our lives. Rather it is learning to live our lives with grateful hearts no matter what our circumstances. To have a grateful heart is to be open to all that life offers, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the happy and the sad. To have a grateful heart is a way of being in the world; it is not an act we must perform. Life, itself, is the gift and being able to live that gift in a community of caring folks is a blessing. May we observe this Thanksgiving with open, loving, and grateful hearts, and may we offer a prayer for this community at Fisk Memorial United Methodist Church that it might continue to be a blessed communion.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Rev. Rick Black
