Why don't you join me this Thursday as I attempt to gain some perspective. I’m long over due for a timeout. Perhaps a day, or two, to consider the life that I’ve been blessed to live. How about you? If so, then quit scrutinizing over the recent election; whether your guy won or lost. Forgive your family member for voting for the other guy. Forget about fretting over the royalties you aren't, or even are, getting. Don't go out shopping for deals on Thanksgiving Day...please, just don't do it. Forget about the pipeline row your yard could really do without. Erase the price of natural gas from your memory for a day.

Instead, forgive the fracktivist for believing Josh Fox and Matt Damon. Forgive your landman for being kinda sneaky. Forgive the mineral owner for being kinda ignorant. Take your bratty teenager to a movie and make sure they leave their phone at home. Call your Mother, she wants to hear from you. Go say hello to your home-bound neighbor. Make a list of things you want to change about yourself. Get on the floor and play with your kids, grandkids, or nieces and nephews. Grab your spouse, look them in the eye and tell them that they are special to you. Take the Bible off your shelf, maybe dust it off, and read about the Giver of all good things in James 1:17. And lastly, read Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation...perhaps, even at the dinner table.  And, if these things don’t work? Well, Christmas is just around the corner.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Keith Mauck

Publisher

President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subject to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins; to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand, which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

Abraham Lincoln, 1863