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Resolved, to live with all my might
while I do live; resolved never to lose one moment of time, but improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.
Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.
Johnathan Edwards
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You can turn grief inward or use that energy to give back.
Liza Bercovice, whose daughter was killed in a train crash. She turned her grief to energy and began program called Everybody dance where hundreds of kids learned to dance.
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( AP via Yahoo! News )
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Several years ago, when my daughter, Meg, was leaving the Army, my family met for Thanksgiving in New Orleans(God Bless These Folks!!!).
We went to what we thought was a fun holiday movie, Home For the Holidays.
Home For the Holidays revolved around a family going home for Thanksgiving. Going home for the holidays is a chore for all involved, but somehow it is what families do, even if they don’t like each other very much.
Movies and TV are written by highly intuitive people who have these amazing imaginations and can make happen what they want to happen. In this case, the family, in all its craziness, got through the holiday. The value to the movie, even today as I look back, is to try not to be like the family in the movie: Please Lord, help us not to be like this; and, if we are, what do we need to do to change.
In the real world, at one time or another in the evolvement of the family, members attempt to put things right. Maybe this happens more and more as children mature and parents grow older or certain events happen that cause shunning aside past slights or perceived slights. Look what happened after 9/11: Heart broken images of family members carrying pictures, attempting to find their loved ones killed at the World Trade Center or Pentagon were splashed all over television and the newspapers. After seeing these images or experiencing the personal loss of 9/11, who could not be moved to get things squared away with the family?
The images of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers grieving for their loved ones killed at war in Iraq is also very heartbreaking; Most killed are young people younger than twenty-five. One never knows when our life will end, so we think of the importance of family. Thanksgiving is a great backdrop for setting things right.
Whether it is renewed patriotism, church-going, or just getting together, family involvement is where it is.
Television is full of programs about families reconciling, reprioritizing, getting their differences resolved. TV shows like the The Guardian, now cancelled, was about a corporate lawyer forced to do community service and the impact it had on his life and family. Movies like Pay It Forward were around before September 11, but now somehow the meaning(someone does a kind deed for you, so Pay it Forward) is more apparent. And, of course, the relevance of movies like Band of Brothers, the miniseries about soldiers(in their own way a family) in World War II fighting to save the world, is no small thing.
Networks build much of their programming around such dramas as 7th Heaven, One Tree Hill, The OC, and the Gilmore Girls. Even though some might regard these shows as somewhat superficial, they all have heavy duty family themes. It is figuring out how to come together, putting differences aside, and seeing truly what is important.
What many of these TV shows are attempting to do is a kind of going back to the basics, i.e., those things that truly have meaning; in a sense, "This is the way it was when we were younger". Although we can never go back, what we can do is capture those truly good things in life and hold on to them with a "tight grip". The skeptics and prognosticators and social scientists will inevitably begin to question the viability of the American family, but recapturing the spirit of our own family would be no small thing and prove the skeptics wrong.
God Bless and Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. JHL
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Thanksgiving is the most American of all Holidays. We Americans invented Thanksgiving and this is not surprising because of all the nations in the world, we have the most to be thankful for. We have freedom in a magnificant land that stretches from sea to shining sea. We have science, we have medicine, we have rich farmlands and soaring skyscrapers and great cathedrals and quiet churches.
If you are an American, you have every right to be proud and grateful.
And there's one more thing you should be thankful for: you should be thankful for you. If you are precious in God's eyes; and, you most certainly are, then be grateful for the life God has given you and the constant blessings that are yours.
From Norman Vincent Peale's Be Thankful For You
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| To those, who by persistence in doing good, seek glory, honor, and immortality, he will give eternal life. Romans 2:7
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Happy Thanksgiving
Have a wonderful time with family and friends.
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