In this challenging time let's remember a Special Message below from 1883, when there was another time of anxiety in our country's history. The sea flows, the wind blows, GOD knows.

                                            **********************
 It's 1863, the future of the United States was in the balance as a brutal Civil War raged. In this desperate time President Lincoln led the hearts, minds, and souls of our country to take stock of our gifts and our errors with a national “DAY of THANKSGIVING” offered to God. Here are some of Lincoln’s words in this announcement that should be in our hearts this Thanksgiving 2024.

On our countries natural gifts and material abundance.

” 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”

On our gratitude to God

“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 even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.”

On our Reconciliation

“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

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