Hillsdale College has produced a wonderful Thanksgiving video featuring its president, Dr. Larry P. Arnn, recalling the history of the Thanksgiving holiday and our seemingly forgotten dependence on fruitful harvests for our sustenance. Year-round vegetables, ready-made bread and butter, and plentiful plump turkeys at the grocery store down the street make it easy for us to forget what is actually required to produce the typical Thanksgiving meal.
Dr. Arnn reminds us that life wasn’t always so easy, and that putting food on the table is so much more than a quick trip to the supermarket. To this day, even in an age of industrial farming using cutting edge technology, we depend on God’s provision for each harvest. Despite all our knowledge and technology, droughts, floods, and diseases can still wreak havoc on our crops. Widespread hunger can be just one poor harvest away.
“Thanksgiving comes in the autumn, and it comes when the harvest is in. The thing that you harvest grows of its own accord. And you can’t make that happen,” Dr. Arnn notes. “And so there was this movement that the nation should be grateful and atone at the end of each harvest.”
“Freedom is a blessing. Learning is a blessing. Constitutional government is a blessing,” Dr. Arnn adds. “We should be apologetic. We should be regretful when we fail to count those blessings and live up to them.”
“And we should say so to God, and we should thank him for the existence of those blessings and our chance to pursue them.”
