In this week’s On Faith blog, the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn posed the following question to me and my fellow panelists:
In October 1789, President George Washington declared his support for a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God.”
Do you have a Thanksgiving blessing or prayer? What are you grateful for?
Here is how I responded:
It’s customary in our family to ask this very important question each year, and everybody usually groans and thinks it a chore. Yet, by the time we’re done going around the table, there are always tears in our eyes and lumps in our throats.
That the Dalys will gather for a traditional holiday feast this Thursday is reason enough for which to be thankful.
During this season, my mind often wanders back through the years to my days as an orphan. All my friends would leave campus and head for hearth and home and mom and dad, but I had no home or hearth nor mom or dad to which to return to. One year they cut power to the dorms. At night I lived in the dim and dull light of a battery powered lamp. (If you remember that classic Christmas episode of “Happy Days” where Fonzie is all alone in the auto-repair shop eating cold baked beans from a can, you’ll know how I felt.)
This year, I continue to be thankful for a gracious God who doesn’t give me everything I might want, but always gives everything (and more) that I need. I thank God each day for the companionship of my best friend and the strongest woman I know in this world, my wife, Jean.
Our young grade-school aged boys are healthy, intelligent, respectful, kind and relatively obedient (!) kids, but I am more grateful to see their are hearts are soft and tender to the Creator of the universe. As a dad, I realize that the heart of any problem is the problem of the heart. It’s not just about rules, but relationship. I thank God each day for the privilege of being father of two boys.
Last but certainly not least, I am humbled to be a happy member of the Focus on the Family team. What an awesome thing to see lives saved, changed and improved on a daily basis thanks to the collective effort of our supporters and my colleagues. It is sheer wonder how I went from being the loneliest guy on campus to leading an international outreach to families. But then again, in God’s economy, all things are possible.
Alas, I would like to pose the same question to you:
Do you have a Thanksgiving blessing or prayer? What are you grateful for?
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