Thanksgiving in a time of need

Thanksgiving comes this year during some tough and confusing times. Folks are hurting and some of us may even be wondering what we have to be thankful for this year.

Of course, the celebrants of the first Thanksgiving may well have asked that same question. More than half of them died the preceding winter, and the winter to come promised to be just as harsh. They were strangers in a hard and foreign land. But things had changed through their struggle to survive and in that struggle they had changed as well. They reached out in desperation to the native people, whose kindness to these newcomers probably saved their lives. They learned to work with these strangers, to take care of each other, and to pray with a renewed energy and gratitude for what they had — the very things they had once taken for granted: their daily bread, the dawn of a new day, the people whose compassion brought them through the worst trial of their lives.

We can be grateful for those things too this year, and we can learn, as they did, to embrace our circumstances with an eye toward seeing the blessings that they bring. We can decide to work together and help each other through these times, to pray with gratitude for the things we have taken for granted and to trust that God, as he always does, will make something good out of our struggles, just as he did for those at the first Thanksgiving.

Rev. Mark Lukens is the pastor of the Bethany Congregational Church in East Rockaway.