This week, in honor of Thanksgiving, I thought that I
would write about the 4 things that I am most thankful for. We will move our
celebration day to Thursday (for obvious reasons) and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
and Friday would be the days that I will tell you what I’m thankful for, and
talk about them a bit.
#4—The United States of America
Our country has seen some pretty rough times of late. We’ve
seen a very contentious presidential election, riots in the streets because we
are unhappy that our candidate lost, racial discriminations seem to be on the
rise, winking and nodding at sin like it really isn’t sin, and many other
things seem to be causing people to look at America as a laughing stock.
But the truth of the matter is that this is still the
greatest country in the world. We are free here to worship, to pray, to speak
our minds, and to assemble without the fear of our government coming in and
carting us all off to jail. In many countries, these things are not true. Any
gathering of Christians can be broken up and the leaders can be taken to jail
simply because they are meeting in the Name of Jesus.
But here in the USA, we have the right to assemble and
to pray and to worship our God. In fact, that is why the Pilgrims first came to
this new land. They were not okay with being forced into a certain way of
believing simply because their government told them that was how they should
believe. So they came here to live in peace and worship as they thought best.
The founder of our government, while not all Christians,
believed that God had brought them there for a purpose and they were not going
to shrink from that purpose. They set up a government that was not free from
religion, but a government that was supposed to uphold and honor the rights of
every citizen to worship how they saw fit. It was (and in many cases still is)
a melting pot of people with many different lifestyles, tastes, languages,
customs and religions. Some of what has been “thrown in” has stuck; other
things have not; but in all cases, we are all a part of the same group of
people who came here to start over, and find new freedoms in a new land.
So I am thankful that in this country we are still free
to pray, to worship, to meet together and to speak our minds without the fear
of harassment or punishment. I am thankful for the United States of America!
Thanks for reading this today, and have a great
Thanksgiving week. We’ll see you on Sunday!
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