What is the Lord Whispering to You This Thanksgiving?

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“Always dance with joy before our Honored Chief! I will say it again: dance with joy! Let everyone see how kind and thoughtful you are. Our Honored Chief is close at hand. Do not let your hearts be weighed down with anything. Instead, with every step you take, send your voice to the Great Spirit, asking him for the things you need. And in all your prayers remember to give him thanks.” 

Phil 4:4-6 The First Nations Version: Indigenous Translation of the New Testament

 
Hi Friends,
 
Happy Thanksgiving! It’s a week earlier this year on November 23rd, so if you’re like me, you may feel a little breathless that the Holidays are here already!
 
But it’s all good. It’s going to be fantastic and gives us a few more days to enjoy the Christmas season!
 
In approaching Thanksgiving, instead of blindly falling into doing the same thing year after year, I like to “prayerfully lean in”, asking the Lord what he would have me focus on and if there’s anything that he would have us do differently. When I did this earlier this month, I was surprised at what arose.
 
For six months, the Spirit has been guiding me to study Native American faith and history. Instead of going with the natural flow of expressing more gratitude during November, I felt prompted to lean into how Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.
 
What I discovered shocked me. I thought I knew Native American history. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read, and even taught my children year after year as we homeschooled, about Squanto helping the pilgrims through their first winter, and the big Thanksgiving celebration where the settlers invited the Native Americans and they celebrated for days together.
 
We remember portraits of smiling faces, peace, and harmony but did you know that Native Americans look at Thanksgiving as a day of mourning?
 
To them, Thanksgiving brings back memories of more broken treaties than you can count, slavery, and the annihilation of their people and culture.
 
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a resolution making, the Friday after Thanksgiving, what most of us have only ever known as Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, National American Indian Heritage Day!
 
Umm, I’m 56 years old, have lived in the United States, and have been educated in the US School system all my life, and have never heard of this?!
 
“Oh, no,” I thought. “Here we go again. Another culture that white Europeans have oppressed who want justice. Another people group who want to smash our store windows, steal merchandise, and be awarded billions of federal $$’s with no end in sight.
We’re bad. They’re good.”
 
But it wasn’t like that at all.
 
Good people came with good intent at first. Then greed, human nature, and evil swooped in. Treaties were made and broken. Native Americans were pushed off their land. They were overtaken by missionaries who yes, brought the gospel but also heartlessly shipped their children off to missionary schools where they cut their hair, stripped them of their clothes, and punished them for uttering a word in their native language.
 
Instead of approaching the Native American people with humility, bringing the gospel and other strengths of our culture, and then turning the tables to sit at their feet and let them teach us. We deemed their song, dance, and every component of their culture that was foreign to us, of the devil and forbidden.
 
In so doing we missed out on the unique gifts, spiritual strengths, and connection to God as Creator they were meant to bring to the Body of Christ.  
 
It makes me wonder with the importance of covenants in God’s eyes, if the disintegration of our society could be linked to the breaking of these foundational covenants upon which our nation was built.  
 
With the long history of evangelism and such a small percentage converted, could it be that we have prevented Native Americans from coming to Christ by requiring them to become European, something impossible for their God-shaped DNA, in coming?
 
Just as God made each part essential to the body’s overall well-being, what have we missed by stamping out our Native American brothers and sisters? Have we forced them to be a third hand, as we’ve been hobbling around as a cripple, dragging the foot we’d been missing all along?
 
From my research, they don’t want groveling, cash, or permission to commit violent acts but a simple acknowledgment of the pain that has been inflicted and a welcoming appreciation of the gifts they bring.
 
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Whoa, sorry if that was a heavier topic than you came to hear!
 
It’s Thanksgiving week for goodness’ sake, can we please talk about turkey, football, and relatives?!
 
Now, that I’ve dumped this huge issue with a more tangled web than any of us could ever untangle into your lap, what in the world are you supposed to do about it?
 
Nothing.
 
Just like all the issues of life, they are not on our shoulders, but only what the Spirit of God whispers in your ear. We never have to force anything. All our Father asks is that we keep our ears open. When we hear Him speak, listen, and obey.  
 
For me, looking at the threads he’s been weaving, I’m waiting, listening, and watching. For now, maybe it’s just something he’s doing inside me. Maybe there will be an event I can attend on Native Indian Heritage Day.
 
But the real question is,
 
Whether it’s at the beginning of a year, a month, or before a holiday, have I truly comprehended that for reasons I will never understand, I have a God who will speak to me, to do in my life things that are way beyond what I could imagine, when I prayerfully lean in and ask, “Lord, what would you have me focus on right now?”
 
What is he saying to you this Thanksgiving?  

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Other great Thanksgiving articles to listen to while you’re preparing your Thanksgiving feast,

Invitation to Holy Hospitality

Welcoming the Stranger … and who could be “Strange-er” than your Relatives?

Eugene Peterson’s fantastic book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction