Giving Thanks
This will be the only T4D for this week. I’m traveling with my team (family) from Atlanta to Chicago where we’ll gather with my two brothers and their families and Mom & Dad and together celebrate the Thanksgiving Holiday.  It will be a time filled with renewal, remembrance, and lots of love and laughs. With any luck it will also include some of Mom’s pies!
I have collected a few quotes, and thoughts around Thanksgiving as well as a few of my favorite clip art images. My wish is that you might enjoy them as I have and that your Thanksgiving and mine …need not be tied to a holiday…but to our hearts.  Gratitude is not an event that takes place on a given day…but a virtue that can be lived each and every day.
Joy and happiness are born of gratitude. Â Gordon T. Watts
We can lift ourselves, and others as well, when we refuse to remain in the realm of negative thought and cultivate within our hearts an attitude of gratitude. Â Thomas S. Monson
A grateful heart is a beginning of greatness…It is a foundation for the development of such virtues as prayer, faith, courage, contentment, happiness, love and well-being. Â Â James E Faust
“Thanksgiving Day comes by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow. Â Â Edward Sanford Martin
Gratitude is a state of appreciation, an act of thanksgiving, which causes us to be humble because we recognize an act of kindness, service, or caring from someone else which lifts us and strengthens us. Â Robert D. Hales
Thanksgiving - Giving Thanks - Being thankful for what one is given -
I heard this guy on the radio saying that each year he makes a list of 26 things he’e grateful for using the alphabet as a guide…something that begins with each letter. I liked the idea and will be doing it this year with my own family.
Another favorite follows…
November 25th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Abraham Lincoln-Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.
And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own 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 only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
And, in so much as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but 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 behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness. (Proclamation setting apart, Thursday the 30th day of April, 1863 a day of National humiliation, fasting, and prayer)
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things [referring to the great blessings of this land]. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and 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 next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. (Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day, made October 3, 1863)