A Meditation on Thanksgiving
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day. I pass before me the mainsprings of my heritage: The fruits of the labors of countless generations who lived before me, without whom my own life would have no meaning; The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams; The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp and whose words could only find fulfillment in the years which they would never see; The workers whose sweat has watered the trees, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations; …The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence that I have never done my best, I have never reached for the highest; The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the children of God as the waters cover the sea. All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel, I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee, Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.
-From Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman
