Give Thanks!

For this years Thanksgiving celebrations we once again traveled up to Uncle Tim and Aunt Carmen's house for our annual family gathering. This year though, the weather arrangements were quite different. Where as last November there was snow on the ground, this year the forcast was predicting high 50's. Heading up north on our hour and fifteen minute drive this picture shows what Joshua, our driver, had to deal with! Praise God we were able to get through the worst part safely and sooner than later we broke into a sunny patch of sky and it was clear sailing the rest of the way!

Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!
Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:4-7

That I may proclaim with the voice of thanksgiving,
and tell of all Your wondrous works.
Psalm 26:7

What a feast there was to have as we filled our plates with the many scrumptious dishes brought.

Blessed be the Lord, Who daily loads us with benefits, The God of our salvation!
Psalm 68:19

A delicious and delicately designed pumpkin pie with cinnamon swirls on top! Christianna and our friend Theresa were the chefs who created this traditional dish for our thanksgiving feast! 

The breaking of the "Wish Bone". Can you guess who won? 

Because we had not been able to get a family picture with us all dressed up at our Church's Harvest Festival, we therefore took the opportunity at hand and celebrated our national holiday in tradition garb and captured this photo at the end of the day of us all together!

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and 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 as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

Abraham Lincoln 1863