Go Ahead and Thank God

We may not realize it, but our celebration of Thanksgiving has a rich and yet sorrowful history.  In 1863, then President Abraham Lincoln designated the last Thursday of the month to be a day set aside as “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”  Why?  We’ll it was because Lincoln was peering over the landscape of a divided nation.  A nation where brother turned against brother and the result was The Civil War.  Now if Abraham Lincoln and the entire nation could give thanks in the middle of that kind of tension, just imagine the kind of praise and thanksgiving we can give to God for the circumstances we find ourselves in: some wonderful and joy-filled and others just plain hard.  And so this thanksgiving I wonder as we gather together at our dinner tables we could pray with all of our hearts a prayer of thankfulness.  Let us pray: 

I give Thee thanks for every drop— 

The bitter and the sweet. 

I praise Thee for the desert road, 

And for the riverside; 

For all Thy goodness hath bestowed, 

And all Thy grace denied. 

I thank Thee for both smile and frown, 

And for the gain and loss; 

I praise Thee for the future crown 

And for the present cross. 

I thank Thee for both wings of love 

Which stirred my worldly nest; 

And for the stormy clouds which drove 

Me, trembling, to Thy breast. 

I bless Thee for the glad increase, 

And for the waning joy; 

And for this strange, this settled peace 

Which nothing can destroy.

--Jane Crewdson (1860)