Monday, November 29, 2010

Be Thankful for More Than Technology

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Were you thankful? Really? What for? Your Windows 7 laptop? Your Android smartphone? Your HDTV? We need to move beyond that and be thankful for what really matters in life.

I think Abraham Lincoln said it best in his 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation speech; "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 God 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 land, to set apart and observe the third Thursday in November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."

I can truly say I am thankful for my family, the people in my life, and the manifold blessings from God above. But I have no delusions. Tomorrow the Androids will still be churning, the HDTV's will still be in razor sharp focus and the laptops will be processing at full power. But it is nice to have one day set aside to remember the One who made it all.

God bless America.

Keith