“Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us , we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen” (BCP, p.632)

I grew up in a farming community in West Tennessee. The cash crop of the day was cotton. In those days before mechanical harvesters, the county schools closed for six weeks in the fall for “cotton picking”. Every available hand was needed to get the crop to the gin and on its way to the cotton mill where my father worked. By Thanksgiving, the fields were bare, the backbreaking work done for another year, the profits in the bank to await the next planting season. Even though you never saw an image of cotton pouring out of an overflowing cornucopia, you knew it was cotton that put the food on the table for the Thanksgiving feast and every day thereafter.

When more of us lived close to Mother Earth, it was easier for us to make the connection between our lives and seedtime and harvest, with the cycles of the seasons, with the need for sun and rain in just the right balance to produce a fruitful harvest. The more our lives depend on technology, however, the easier it is for us to ignore the hand of God at work in creation, in the provision of the bountiful fruits of the earth that we celebrate on Thanksgiving Day. As we look forward to our national day of thanksgiving, it behooves us once again to look at all the things in our daily lives for which we are thankful, to take time to think about all the ways God blesses us individually and in community, in our nation and our world, to recognize that all that we are, all that we have, our very lives, come to us out of the overwhelming abundance of God’s steadfast love.