Tuesday, November 23, 2010

One Hundred Things To Be Thankful For, and According to Most God Wasn't A Priority




Good Evening to All!

We had a very nice Thanksgiving Service at church tonight. We usually have service on Wednesday, but being that Thanksgiving is this week, our Pastor thought it would be a good idea to have service a day early so we could get our Thanksgiving preparations started tomorrow. Anyway, tonight, we had 3 speakers. All were young men of our church. They each did a fine job. One was more experienced I believe because I think he had helped preach in another church before coming here. One was a bit more humorous in his presentation on Thankfulness, which fit his personality perfectly, and the other was a more serious logical approach. He and I were more intuned, I think. While I really enjoyed the others, Dustin spoke on something that really caught my ear. He had done some research on different sites of 100 things to be thankful for, and none had God in the top portion of their list. That floored me so, I came home and did some investigating on my own.

I surveyed ten different sites. Here are the numbers:

1-----Mentioned the "ability to love God" as number 13. I do not consider that being thankful to or for God.

1-----Listed having God in their life as number 51. I don't see a word about being thankful to or for God. Just glad He's in their life.

1-----Lists having faith in God as number 39.

7-----NO MENTION OF GOD AT ALL

Now as I said, I only checked out a few, but it blew me away that God is SO LOW on people's priorities. As Christians we should be thankful to and for God everyday, and He should be number one on our "thankful" list. After all if it weren't for Him we wouldn't be here. Let alone all the niceties that He provides for us. Such as everything everyone mentioned.

I have a thought on that. To me that is "thanking the creation, instead of the creator." Don't get me wrong. I do believe we should be thankful for everything everyone mentioned; family, friends, love, and so on, but I think first on everyone's list should have been thankful to God who made all these other things possible.

After spending the last 30 minutes looking for pictures of "thanksgiving" or giving thanks, I found only 2 "cartoons and one photo portraying the real meaning of Thanksgiving, I mean people praying. The rest were of food, or the pilgrims and Indians. I understand that the Pilgrims and Indians are who started the Holiday, per say, but I would think I would have at least been able to find more pictures of people giving thanks to God. Of course I only looked on Google Images, that the only other place I know to look other than Zemanta. Zemanta had pictures of people eating, people at the parade, marching bands and so forth. No one praying or giving thanks to the ONE who deserves it.

Well, I guess this is going to be a short post as I need to get busy on some household duties before I start preparing for Thanksgiving.

Considering the reason we originally broke away from England was for freedom of religion, and our nation was founded on Christian principles, we seem to have drifted far from our founding fathers values, or at least our priorities have been forgotten. God First, Family Second and then everything else. What Happened?

Good night to all and May God Bless!



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4 comments:

lynette355 said...

you brought the point home girlfriend....and very well indeed.
I am grateful for your friendship...but that is because God blessed it from the start.

Crown of Beauty said...

PJ, I appreciate this post, especially in light of Thanksgiving. If the original reason the Pilgrims left England in search of a New World was to find religious freedom, or the freedom to worship God, then it is sad that the US today seems to be drifting so far away from the original heart intention of your nation's founding fathers.

But not only in the US, but also around the world, only a small minority would have God at the top of their thanksgiving list.

Thank you for this heartfelt post. Glad I stopped by today.

Lidj

Laston Lumbanraja, S.Sos said...

Do you celebrate Thanksgiving in church. This is rare or never in Indonesia..

laughwithusblog said...

Very sad. God is the giver of all good gifts!