CSN Founder’s Focus – Remembering Thanksgiving! - 11/23/23
Thanksgiving – a time to assess our roots – to reaffirm our values!
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Note From the Founder…
This day is a traditional American holiday to offer gratitude to God for the blessings we have received throughout the year. However, with two deadly wars raging at this time, it may be quite challenging to focus our attention on any blessings that we have received during the course of 2023.
Nevertheless, this year has not been a year of government lockdowns and serious curtailment of freedoms that we once took for granted as citizens. A hidden blessing in such a recent past is that citizens may no longer continue to be so casual about freedom.
Additionally, this year, several victories were won where skirmishes over the right to vote in fair and honest elections gave hope to those who had been disillusioned with the voting systems across the country. There have been several state governments that have made significant and substantial improvements to their election codes and policies.
Another positive is that truth is being revealed in one state after another where corruption has been existing for some time. It is due to whistleblowers who can no longer remain silent in the shadows of corruption. They are able to cast light upon the shadows. Truth is allowed to shine forth where brave people dare to use their free speech while we still enjoy such a freedom.
Yet, when a culture is filled with an ocean of lies, truth is often diluted and if truth be told, there are many other reasons to be hopeful and many reasons to be thankful in 2023 as we celebrate Thanksgiving. Indeed, there are many problems in America and throughout the world. It was just mentioned that there are two deadly wars ravaging the people of the war torn areas. Yet, if one loses the perspective that there is hope, a great deal of incentive for positive change is undermined. For those who lose hope, the future will always appear bleak.
Faith in God generates hope and throughout human history, the people of faith make a way for God to use them in ways that may appear miraculous. However, when one examines events in the light of common sense, the miraculous is usually God working through His children where faith prevails over despair and hopelessness. This is not magic. Genuine faith in the power of God enables His children to do what normally would be considered extraordinary. Thanksgiving is based upon the history of people allowing God to work through them. However, our nation’s history is a genuine demonstration of God’s intervention in the birth of the Land of the Free. It was not magic. Faith and trust in God enabled ordinary colonists to do extraordinary things.
We are living in dark times, but so did the Pilgrims, and so did the colonists as they had to fight for their lives and for their freedoms, and so did the Americans who were trying to preserve the Union in the dark days of the Civil War. Reading how God has worked through history in the Bible, one discovers amazing accounts of His hand helping His children. That is often easier than observing how God is working right now at this time in history. Yet, He is very much part of His children’s quest to be free and to live in freedom. Faith provides the eyes to see and ears to hear His presence in the events of the day.
Our main article of this edition of the “Founder’s Focus” I offer as one way to provide hope in the darkness and to help readers get back in touch with the deep roots of our national heritage. Our nation has deep roots that originated in the Judeo-Christian heritage. While we celebrate on this Thanksgiving Day, it would be of great value to take stock of where we came from and who we came from, and to truly decide what we believe in. My article is entitled: “Thanksgiving – a time to assess our roots – to reaffirm our values!” And, so it is – in such a time as this.
However, the first message is from President Abraham Lincoln – I cannot jump in front of Mr. Lincoln. We offer his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863. This came after his “Emancipation Proclamation” he offered a year earlier and before his “Gettysburg Address” on November 19, 1863. In such a dark time, Mr. Lincoln was not certain that the Union would prevail in the long horrible war between the North and the South. Yet, he still expressed confidence in the strength of the nation, and in humility before God, he captured the spirit of repentance that he believed was needed in such a divisive and dangerous time. Lincoln had a way of helping others to grasp deeper understanding and relevance from that which they were witnessing. May we have similar enlightenment in this time to discern God’s hand in the present.
Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States - A Proclamation
The year that is drawing toward 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 the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. 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.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United Stated States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
-Abraham Lincoln
Thanksgiving – a time to assess our roots – to reaffirm our values!
By Dennis Jamison 11/22/23
On Thanksgiving Day this year, a majority of Americans will partake in various activities to celebrate the historic holiday. Celebrations usually involve a hearty meal of one sort or another, and the centerpiece is the food (and oftentimes football). Additionally, there are many families of faith who will still sincerely express gratitude for the blessings they received during the year and that was the original centerpiece of celebrating this traditional holiday. The holiday itself is a testament to the reality that the United States of America came into existence through the Judeo-Christian heritage. Thank God, many good citizens are still aware of the foundation.
Yet, in recent decades, elected leaders in several states, and on the national level, have lost touch with this crucial foundation of morality – especially Christian values and basic goodness.
Elected officials are demonstrating more and more that they do not respect such morality – or even the source of deeper religious values. Increasingly, our “leaders” appear to no longer value the principle of God-given rights revealed in the Declaration of Independence. Those rights were eventually instituted in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution.
Yet, if this is a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, as President Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed in his Gettysburg Address in November of 1863, are the people the ones who have lost touch with these fundamental principles and values? After all, it is in our power to vote elected officials out of office who do not represent alignment with values of “We the People.”
Maybe. But, if people who love fame, or power, or wealth were to figure out a way to extend or perpetuate their political dominance on election day, how would “We the People” ever reaffirm our adherence to the self-evident truths we had assumed everyone held in common?
It is important to note that the United States is more of a “divided states of America” in 2023 than a United States. The nation, however, was once in a worse state of affairs. Once long,
long ago, America went to war with itself. It was a brutal, horrible, war that originated in deep divisiveness within the American people. At the core of divisiveness was the “peculiar” institution of African slavery. Today, the central point of contention seems to be whether we are endowed with God-given inalienable rights, or we are at the mercy of government elitists who will decide for the people what rights they deserve.
Today, while the residue of the divisiveness of our Civil War still persists in the hearts and minds of some Americans, most have moved beyond that tragedy. One key point citizens need to hold onto is that America survived that most terrible and devastating time. In that period, Americans were literally at war with one another, attacking and killing their fellow Americans. However, the nation survived; peace prevailed. This is significant, as it may appear that the nation is on the precipice of another Civil War. In the past few years, families and friends have literally been torn apart by one poisonous political perspective or another. Such divisiveness in America weakens the moral fabric that holds the people together. It is no longer a “we the people” who hold common faith and common values derived from that faith.
There are many to whom this does not matter, but for those who prefer peaceful harmony to civil
war, it may be time to ask a simple question: How did we return to this point once again in our history? The simplistic answer can be attributed to the two political factions, and in recent years, it is not the two political parties. It is two political factions – “We the People” vs. political elitists who believe they are the enlightened ones entitled to control the masses. But, there is a more fundamental fragmentation that exists within American society, and that is much more complex: America has become a microcosm of the world’s population.
That which is so divisive in America’s diverse society is our fundamental strength: we are a land of many nations encapsulated in one. Such a diversity of people living in relative harmony giving testimony to “E pluribus unum!” America’s diverse society came about because the Land of the Free became a magnet for people who wanted to be free. Go figure…
On the practical side, many came to get rich – and they still come seeking wealth. Our country is willing to admit anyone. Now, even illegal aliens with criminal intent enter – seeking to get rich quick. Our government is now even willing to admit terrorists cross the border who harbor the intent to destroy the nation from within. So, the elitist geniuses use puppet-like political pawns to manipulate those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free and indoctrinate them into American style socialism.
The elitists and globalists will divide and conquer, if not exposed for who they truly are and what they intend to do through their clever nefarious manipulations. They would not hesitate to drive America into civil strife – even to fight against itself. In the Civil War in Lincoln’s day, the issue at the core of the divisiveness was the “peculiar” institution of African slavery.
Today, there are a number of predominant views about the American Civil War, and what caused it. However, from Lincoln’s perspective, as he explained it succinctly in his Gettysburg Address, it was whether any nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could continue to exist in a world of tyranny. His political enemies, elitists and enlightened ones entitled to control the masses, held a view opposite that of the Declaration of Independence.
In 2023, elitists and the self-proclaimed enlightened ones still feel entitled to control the masses, and they continue to hold a view contrary to the Declaration of Independence. However, in this day, it is no longer controversial that all people are created equal, as that has long been settled – partly by the Civil War. Today, the deeper fundamental contention is whether all people have truly been endowed with certain inalienable rights from God Almighty. In recent years, bedrock documents representing the fundamental ideals of freedom, the Bill of Rights and the roots of God-given rights in the Declaration of Independence, have increasingly come under attack. Like cancer growing within an unsuspecting victim, many attacks originate from inside the U.S. government, specifically from elected “public servants” as well as their appointees.
Never before in our history has the Land of the Free been tested as it is now as to whether we are still dedicated to the proposition that all people are endowed with God-given rights, whether we can still survive in a world comfortable with tyranny. Our people – “We the People,” need to rediscover our roots. On Thanksgiving this year, it would be wise to reconsider the sacrifice and suffering of the Pilgrims and how they persevered, despite all hardships and obstacles, and laid a foundation for self-governance. Additionally, it would be wise to consider that they also made a substantial peace treaty with Wampanoag Indians – people who had little in common with Europeans, people of a different race, people who spoke a different language, people with a different religious heritage, people who shared no common cultural traditions. Yet, from 1621 until 1675, these two peoples enjoyed the fruits of peace in New England. In the Autumn of 1621, that peace led to the “First Thanksgiving” and set the tradition for the holiday we celebrate today. Those roots need to be re-examined, as well as God’s care and guidance of our nation in challenging times such as this. Thanksgiving is an opportune time to reaffirm our self-evident truths and to reclaim our God-given heritage and sacred rights.
A Bit of History
Lincoln's Timeless THANKSGIVING Proclamation: Thanksgiving 1863 – 11/21/2007
From The Thought Company: Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation – 1/27/2019
From CBN: George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation - CBN.com - posted 11/23/2011
From HISTORY.com (w/ video): Thanksgiving 2023 - Tradition, Origins & Meaning | HISTORY – 10/27/2009
From American Battlefield Trust: Fall Harvest & Thanksgiving – 10/27/2022
True Fact Check -
We strive for accuracy and objectivity in the entries in this section. But if readers see anything that doesn't look historically correct, send us an email and let us know your feedback: dj.light@protonmail.com
Onward and Upward!
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“O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.” Phillips Brooks