Giving Thanks on Thanksgiving!

Please Note: The library is closed Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving. The Morton girls’ basketball team has a tournament going on Friday and Saturday. Therefore, I have decided not to blog on Saturday. I plan to return the following Monday. Have a great Thanksgiving weekend!


www.prolifebook.com

www.pro-lifetube.com

A PRO-LIFE organization that I strongly support is LIFE DECISIONS INTERNATIONAL!

Its website is at: www.fightpp.org

—

http://christiangunslinger.blogspot.com is 100% PRO-LIFE.

http://christiangunslinger3.blogspot.com political discussions based upon Christian values.

http://christiangunslinger5.blogspot.com deals with the immoral, sinful agenda of homosexual activists.

—

From: The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty www.becketfund.org

“Several years ago, our founder, Seamus Hasson, wrote the following piece about Thanksgiving. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do:

Forgetting the holy: The Feast of the Intransitive Verb

http://www.becketfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Forgetting-the-holy-The-Feast-of-the-Intransitive-Verb.pdf

Published Thursday, November 25, 1999

By Kevin ‘Seamus’ Hasson

Every fourth Thursday in November work and school are canceled so that families can gather together for the day and thank—well, we’ll get to just who it is they may be thanking in a minute. They also enjoy good food, good company and good football. The holiday is currently called Thanksgiving, although there is reason to think that may have to change.

Just about every other religious holiday has been stripped of its original meaning and transformed into a more secular version of its former self. Why should Thanksgiving be any different? In Pittsburgh, Christmas and Hanukkah morphed into ‘Sparkle Season’ and then disintegrated further into ‘Downtown Pittsburgh Sparkles.’ Public school systems across the country are renaming the Easter Bunny the ‘Special Bunny.’ Even Halloween is being transformed out of concern for its rampant religiosity. In many places it is now the ‘Fall Festival Celebration.’ Surely Thanksgiving, a state-sanctioned holiday that purports to give the nation a day to thank God, cannot withstand the small, furious army of radical secularists determined to take the ‘holy’ out of our holidays. A day set aside to thank God can hardly be appropriate when the celebration of Christmas, Hanukkah and even Halloween has become taboo. Something will have to be done.

So I have a modest proposal: Let’s practice truth-in-labeling and call the November holiday that was formerly Thanksgiving, ‘The Feast of the Intransitive Verb.’ Intransitive verbs, as we all remember from those unpleasant days of diagramming sentences in grammar school, are verbs that do not require an object. Verbs in sentences like ‘The horse ran’ and ‘The wind blows’ are intransitive because the horse doesn’t have to run anything or the wind blow anything. They can simply run and blow without any object at all. Well, what about the verb ‘to thank’? It’s supposed to have an object. You can’t just sit there and ‘thank.’ You have to thank someone. Which is why secularists don’t use that word much in late November anymore. Their creed requires them to celebrate the day by being grateful while thanking no one. And it’s embarrassing to have to choose between being politically and grammatically correct. So secularists prefer the circumlocution ‘to give thanks.’ It doesn’t require an object. You can get away with ‘giving thanks’ without having to be grateful to anyone in particular. It’s much more comfortable that way. Thank whomever you want. Or, don’t thank anyone, it’s entirely up to you. Either way you can still ‘give thanks.’ That’s the beauty of using an intransitive verb; it doesn’t need any object.

Of course, once the object of our gratitude is out of the way it’s all down hill. The rest of the day is uncommonly easy to secularize. It has none of the outward trappings of a religious holiday. There are no babes in mangers or symbolic candles to remove from courthouse steps. No one is ringing church bells that require silencing or allowing children to hunt for eggs that must be renamed. The staples of Thanksgiving—turkeys, cornucopias and pumpkin pies—in and of themselves present no real threat to the secularist ascendancy. And the football games are an absolute godsend (so to speak) for secularists. After all, the more distracted we all are the easier it is to forget about the one to whom we owe gratitude.

So let’s hear it for the Feast of the Intransitive Verb. It’s a worthy companion to ‘Sparkle Season’ (formerly known as Christmas), ‘Special Person Day’ (previously St. Valentine’s Day), and the ‘Spring Festival,’ which was once Easter. Of course, if all this isn’t agreeable to you, if it all seems just a little bit extreme, or even if you’re just worried that turkey and cranberries may never taste the same again, you could always be a thumb in the eye of the radical secularists. You could insist on thanking God, and not settle for generically ‘giving thanks.’ You could tell your neighbors that you’re grateful to God for all He’s done for you. You could even go so far as to tell your children to do the same—to make sure that amidst all the construction paper turkeys they fashion in school they get the message across that they, too, are thanking God.

Defending the public integrity of our holidays is not just petulance. Cultures are built, and eroded, by a succession of public acts both great and small. Everything from the arts we exhibit to the table manners we display makes a difference in building up or wearing down our culture. Public holiday celebrations are particularly potent engines of culture—which is why the secularists have poured so much energy into changing ours. Pittsburgh’s ‘sparkle season,’ for example, has done great damage, not only to Christmas in Pennsylvania, but to our culture nationally. But the fight is far from over. So this weekend enlist in the culture war and thank God.

Kevin J. Hasson is the founder and president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.”

—

From: Family Research Council www.frc.org

“Now Thank You All Our God

Written by FRC Senior Fellow Bob Morrison

This Thanksgiving, we are given another opportunity to examine our hearts and ask ourselves what we are truly thankful for. As American Christians, we can surely thank God for our abundant harvest. Despite difficult economic times that have dragged on for years, America’s farmers, by God’s grace and their own untiring labors, have continued to bring forth the bounty of the earth. For this we should be profoundly grateful. Yes, this year’s Thanksgiving feast will be a bit more expensive than last year's. But at an estimated $50 to feed a table of ten, this dinner is truly a wonder.

Simply to gather around a holiday meal and not have to hide, not have to close the shutters, is a blessing. For millions of our fellow Christians, this is not possible. Around the world, in North Korea, China, and especially in the Bloody Crescent, too often the breaking of bread is accompanied by the breaking of heads. We at Family Research Council will pause in our celebrations to pray for our persecuted brothers and sisters in other lands. Our hearts are attuned to the cry of the martyrs.

Last year, we saluted the Romeike family of Tennessee. These Christian home schoolers came to our shores to escape from the unjust laws in their native land—Germany. We welcome this dear family because we see in them the proper descendents of those first English Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. For millions of immigrants arriving here under our protection and under our laws, religious freedom is that beacon of light that draws them here. Ironically, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel who just weeks ago captured the attention of the world by saying it was Christians who are the most persecuted on earth. We thank God for Chancellor Merkel’s courage. We note that this pastor’s daughter has been willing to speak out when many of her male colleagues have cowered and denied the obvious truth.

Caring for our dear fellow Christians undergoing tribulations does not mean we do not care for those in other communities. Our hearts go out especially to the Jews in Israel, who daily endure rocket attacks. Their harvest celebrations are too often punctuated by the wail of an air raid siren. They must grab their toddlers and their gas masks and head for the bomb shelters. The Baha’i in Iran, the Buddhists in Tibet, and the Huigars in Xinjiang Province in China, each of these religious minorities faces cruel oppression. When we pray for our fellow Christians, we are not unmindful of friends in other religions who are likewise endangered.

We also recognize that while we as Christians are not yet meeting in catacombs in America, this home of freedom, there is growing intolerance for the public profession of our faith. FRC has raised the banner of belief. We have sounded the bell of freedom to warn of mounting threats to our free exercise of religion. This Thanksgiving is a good time to pray that we will see a revival of the faith in America and a renewal of our country’s commitment to its First Freedom. We ask for the freedom to worship, to be sure. But we will press for more. We will assert our rights as citizens of this Great Republic. We will insist upon the right to witness for Christ in the public square, knowing we must obey God rather than men.

We have recently celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. This magnificent work has done so much to shape our language, our thoughts, and our very image of our Lord. Still, it was this same King James of England and Scotland who threatened those long ago Pilgrims. ‘They will conform or I will harry them out of the kingdom,’ he decreed. King James thought he could force these Christian dissenters to attend his church and pay taxes to support his clergy.

It was from resistance to this idea—that the government can dictate to the consciences of the people (Think the perverted homosexual agenda and wantonly MURDERING unborn babies!—my addition)—that America was born. The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving feast of 1621 would never have happened had they stayed at home in England and bowed their necks to the king’s yoke.

Thanksgiving is thus for us as American as the Fourth of July, as American as apple pie. And it is a special day for Christians to remember whom we thank for the blessings of liberty. Now thank we all our God.”

—

From: One Million Moms http://onemillionmoms.com/

Psalms 106: 1 (NIV)

“Praise the Lord.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.”

Psalms 107: 8 (NIV)

“Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind ….”

Ephesians 5: 20 (NIV)

“[A]lways giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I Corinthians 1: 4 (NIV)

“I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.”

I Thessalonians 5: 18 (NIV)

“[G]ive thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Have a great and thankful Thanksgiving!

“Thank you, LORD, for saving my soul

Thank you, LORD, for making me whole”

By Seth and Bessie Sykes