I hope you and your family have enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. At our house, we hosted 40 people from all parts of our family. Actually, I’m not sure I’m even related to all those people, but by gosh we joyfully fed them all and still had leftovers! I smoked 2 turkeys, deep-fried another and added a ham to the table to make sure there was plenty. Now we’ll be making turkey gumbo, turkey and ham sandwiches, turkey salad, turkey chili, and whatever else we can think of. I love having a house full of guests on Thanksgiving. I even love the ear-splitting sounds of screaming grandchildren and nieces and nephews because it’s a wonderful reminder that God is still sending replacements into the world to take over and do better than the generation who created them. And besides, thanks to years of playing music way too loud and shooting shotguns in duck blinds and rifles from a deer stand, I don’t hear much anyway.

While Thanksgiving is for most families a time to feast, it ought to be a time to connect us to God, each other, and the wonderful history of this great nation of ours. It’s a uniquely American holiday, celebrated in honor of the early Pilgrims who set aside a day for the express purpose to thank God for his blessings and sustenance in this new land they had risked all to settle in. They had escaped the tyranny and religious persecution of their motherland to find genuine freedom and to be able to raise their children steeped in the notion that God created us as equals before Him. It was the very first Faith, Freedom, and Family conference if you will. And those principles are the true building blocks of what would become the United States of America.

This year, I’m especially thankful that it appears that our nation might be returning to that blessed foundation. 
Elections are never perfect and political candidates certainly aren't, but there has been a resetting and re-alignment of our nation’s government in which the hard-working people of this country from every race, color, gender, ethnicity, religion, education level, economic standing, and political party have repudiated the cancer of treating people differently because of their race, religion or education level. We celebrate simply being Americans. Some of us are white, some black, some brown, others red or yellow. But we are equally American. Some of us are Christian, some are Jews, others are Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh, or even none of the above. But all are American. Some of us are rich, some are poor, and A lot are somewhere in between. But we are all American. What we share is not a color of skin, but a commitment to common sense, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to self-govern, to dream and do great things, to live in a land where one may start at the bottom but is not sentenced to stay there and where through hard work and taking risks, anything can become possible.

I believe the lesson of this recent election is that those of us who think America is a great nation with a flawed, but yet wonderful history have spoken. We have rejected the notion that we are nation of racists, misogynists, uneducated and hate-filled bigots. Like our ancestors from the original Thanksgiving, we are simple people who love freedom, faith and family. And however we practice it, we celebrate it as Americans grateful for the God who gave us this great land.