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Thanks be to Our Gracious God
In October 1789, President George Washington declared his support for a day of "public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God."
Do you have a Thanksgiving blessing or prayer? What are you grateful for?
It's customary in our family to ask this very important question each year, and everybody usually groans and thinks it a chore. Yet, by the time we're done going around the table, there are always tears in our eyes and lumps in our throats.
That the Dalys will gather for a traditional holiday feast this Thursday is reason enough for which to be thankful.
During this season, my mind often wanders back through the years to my days as an orphan. All my friends would leave campus and head for hearth and home and mom and dad, but I had no home or hearth nor mom or dad to which to return to. One year they cut power to the dorms. At night I lived in the dim and dull light of a battery powered lamp. (If you remember that classic Christmas episode of "Happy Days" where Fonzie is all alone in the auto-repair shop eating cold baked beans from a can, you'll know how I felt.)
This year, I continue to be thankful for a gracious God who doesn't give me everything I might want, but always gives everything (and more) that I need. I thank God each day for the companionship of my best friend and the strongest woman I know in this world, my wife, Jean.
Our young grade-school aged boys are healthy, intelligent, respectful, kind and relatively obedient (!) kids, but I am more grateful to see that their are hearts are soft and tender to the Creator of the universe. As a dad, I realize that the heart of any problem is the problem of the heart. It's not just about rules, but relationship. I thank God each day for the privilege of being father of two boys.
Last but certainly not least, I am humbled to be a happy member of the Focus on the Family team. What an awesome thing to see lives saved, changed and improved on a daily basis thanks to the collective effort of our supporters and my colleagues. It is sheer wonder how I went from being the loneliest guy on campus to leading an international outreach to families. But then again, in God's economy, all things are possible.
By
Jim Daly
|
November 23, 2010; 12:57 PM ET
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Posted by: Secular | November 27, 2010 2:05 PM
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Thank you for glorifying God for everything. I'm thankful for the large house my family has been building, altho it's not "warmed-in" yet. God is faithful! Ps. 62:8
Posted by: MelodyMG1 | November 26, 2010 7:05 PM
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AHA HAAAAAAA Ah Hahahahaha, o' i con't stop fartin & laughin. Please
Please See POPE's PICTURE on [FREE] CONDOMS. What a way to start Hanukkah. OYE...!
The NON-CiRCUMCISED Ishlami Ummah is Laughin Too. SHAME!
Posted by: iamamerican | November 25, 2010 9:28 PM
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So God is omniscient enough to give us what we need? I guess I've needed to be unemployed for the past 27 months. I guess I've needed to have my health deteriorate to the point where I cannot stand for mor than 15-20 minutes at a time. I guess I needed to have my unemployment run out. I guess I needed to develop impotence. I guess I needed Social Security to delay on my disability for 5+ months. It's amazing the things an all-knowing deity knows that I need that I would never have given a thought to.
Posted by: mhjhahkh | November 25, 2010 8:35 PM
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A THANKSGIVING PSALM
Oh give thanks to the LORD; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples! Sing to him; sing praises to him; tell of all his wondrous works! Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice!
Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually! Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles and the judgments he uttered. He is the LORD our God; his judgments are in all the earth.
Sing to the LORD, all the earth! Tell of his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples! For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and he is to be held in awe above all gods.
For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the LORD made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and joy are in his place. Ascribe to the LORD, O clans of the peoples, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength!
Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; bring thanksgiving and come before him! Worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice, and let them say among the nations, “The LORD reigns!” Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD, for he comes to judge the earth.
Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!—I Chronicles 16
Have a thankful Thanksgiving.
Posted by: RCofield | November 25, 2010 12:21 PM
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I am happy I no longer live in Daly's intolerant Jesuslandia where his followers would deny certain religions the right to build a house of worship, would deny gay, Mexican and Muslim US citizens their Constitutional rights and use gays to demonize as scapegoats. I wonder if his children have hearts "soft and tender" toward them and others different or if Daly has taught them to hate as well.
Posted by: areyousaying | November 25, 2010 8:24 AM
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I am thankful that our founding fathers did not create a theocracy or an established church and did their best to keep religion out of our government. Certainly we have had times in which religious foolishness has triumphed as when we added "In God we Trust" to our money when we act as if our money is our god or when we added "under God" to the Pledge in an absurd fit of anti-communist hysteria, but by and large, we have kept generally kept religions from interfering in our laws and our society.
As we approach the 150th anniversary of the secession of slave states, we can remind ourselves that history shows that people will try to justify anything by saying God wants it. The slaveowners were adamant that God had endorsed slavery. They founded church bodies to defend their support of slavery. Some of those church bodies still exist today.
I am thankful that I do not have to follow laws that were imposed on us just because someone claimed that God wanted that law passed. Thanks to the foresight of the drafters of the US Constitution, we have usually managed to keep publicly-religious people from using God's supposed will as an excuse to use the law to tell people what to do.
I am thankful that the Supreme Court has been willing to stand up to those who want to impose their religious teachings on the rest of us. It would be nice if all religious people would stop trying to violate the First Amendment.
Posted by: david6 | November 24, 2010 10:00 AM
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Apparently whatever good that happens to us human beings is what the sky-daddy does for us. However, all the bad that happens is either because we invited it or the devil did it.