Living Thankful!

Nov 25, 2013 by Jim and Jerolyn Bogear

Happy Thanksgiving!  As we celebrate with family and friends we wanted to take a very short moment to say thank you to all of you. We are blessed in so many ways and grateful for all that God has provided in family, friends, and so many healthy, life-giving, and energizing relationships. Thank you.

So, like so many of you, we are taking time to be cognizant of God’s blessings and to offer up thanks to Him. Enjoy your family, friends, celebrating old and, possibly, beginning new traditions. But whatever you do, as you celebrate, remember to say thanks to someone for their life and their love for you.

Excerpts from President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863 (These words are good reminders and still appropriate for us today):

“The year that is drawing towards its close 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.”

“…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.”

Blessings to you, your families, and a Happy Thanksgiving,

~ Jim and Jerolyn Bogear