Thanksgiving!

Well this week I am spending some much needed home time with family. David Jr is home from College and my mother has come for a visit (for the USA Thanksgiving Holiday).

The tradition goes all the way back to 1621 (if you are from Canada, 1578) when the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast. This colony was not the first permanent English settlement in the new world. That honor goes to Jamestown (1607). However, while the first permanent settlement was established in search of economic opportunity, this one was established for religious purposes. Rather than being entrepreneurs like many of the settlers of Jamestown, a significant proportion of the settlers of Plymouth (later called Pilgrims) were fleeing religious persecution and searching for a place to worship as they saw fit.

Throughout their first brutal winter, most of the Pilgrims remained on board the ship they had arrived in, known as the Mayflower.  In March, the surviving settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Abenaki tribesman who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with a man named Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe. Squanto had been kidnapped and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. I find it amazing how this former slave was able to forgive and then come to the aid of the race that had enslaved him.

Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped the settlers forge an alliance with the Wampanoag, a local tribe, which would endure for more than 50 years. In the Autumn of 1621 the settlers and natives held a feast before God for his provision. This feast was a celebration of thanks to God for allowing the colony (1/2 of the original settlers had lost their lives) to survive their first winter and collect a bountiful harvest the next fall.

Today we find it challenging to think of surviving a winter or facing starvation, scurvy or exposure to the elements. However, today I wanted to stop and reflect on all we have to be thankful for.

I am thankful that God allowed his Word to spread to the “New World” through early colonists. I am thankful for religious freedom in a country that still allows me to worship as I see fit. I am thankful for a wife who is supportive and loving. I am thankful for a mother who taught me how to love Jesus. I am thankful for the ability to teach my children about the giver of all good and perfect gifts (James 1:17). 

And I am thankful for you!

Beginning

Whenever one starts a new adventure in writing it is always with some sense of inadequacy and nervousness that anyone will be interested in what you have written . I have been challenged to begin blogging for some time now and have always found an excuse for not beginning. You know what they say about excuses. When you start making them, one excuse is as good as another.

So now it is 1:00 am on a Monday morning and I find myself awake and putting a few words onto a virtual landscape. I have promised myself that I would complete a goal of writing a book this year. I have been told that a great way to start is to "blog." So, here we go.

Last evening my son was remarking how he had to write a four page paper, on Isaac Newton, for school by this morning and I replied, "That nothing, I have to write 1,500 words for and article tomorrow for work." "Yeah but I'm only 15," he retorted. And that brought back memories of my 15th year.

I hated writing! I always found it such a waste of my valuable time. I would much rather talk and have someone else write the words down. Even in college I remember needing to complete an assignment of one page a week and I remember employing every trick in the book to get to one whole page. Larger font, choosing a bigger style, using synonyms liberally. I also used to "copy" other obscure author's work and barely change enough words in the sentence in order to avoid the dreaded accusation of plagiarism. I also procrastinated with the best of them. I remember the semester I had to write those "one pagers" (as we used to call them). I waited until the night before the final and then stayed up all night to complete the whole semester of writing. Ah, those were the days.

Looking back, I think I know why I hated to write. It was just plain difficult and very laborious to get the words down on the page. My penmanship was atrocious, I couldn't spell to save my life and I was a very slow typist.  I stared out on a manual typewriter and every so often my finger would miss a letter and I would get it caught between the keys. Then came the Selectric electric typewriter and you had to be careful not to double type a letter. Finally there was the personal computer with it's glowing amber or green mono-color screen and incessant blinking cursor. That blinking cursor just kept mocking me and mocking me. Daring me to type while I sat with my "writers block" and stared back at the screen and wondered how I would ever be able to complete a whole term paper.

I actually used to hate writing so much that I would do almost anything to avoid it. This of course forced me to become very creative. In my introduction to computers class, I was asked to write a research paper with an introduction, ten pages of body, a conclusion and a bibliography. The subject was how we would use a personal computer in our career. I was a quick thinker and came up with the perfect plan to circumnavigate the assignment and still pull an "A." My career of choice would be a computer graphics artist. I dutifully wrote the one page introduction, as well as the one page conclusion and bibliography. I then asked a computer geek "friend" of mine to print me out ten pages of rendered computer graphic "bodies." I had ten pages of "body"and no actual words on the page. I think I only received an "A-" but at least it was an "A."

So here I sit, well after midnight, voluntarily writing a blog about how I hated to write. How times have changed. I think I better stop now before I get too sentimental.

Have I completed my first page yet?