The Year 2020 Was A NightMare; Should We Be Thankful This Thanksgiving?

Is there anyone in America that has not been affected negatively by the year 2020? 

If your political spectrum is that of far-right, you are most assuredly depressed by the election results earlier this month. If you are moderate but still right-leaning, you, too, are most likely unhappy.

This year, you have masked up, traveled out, only to find your favorite Italian eatery with a sign that said, “Closed due to COVID.” No longer were you able to take the family out bowling on Saturday night or take your girl (or guy) to your favorite hangout that served adult beverages and had the game on the big screen. 

For that matter, the big game was likely canceled altogether if you happen to be a baseball fan. Football fans are even being challenged with “fake crowd noise” being injected (because nobody is in the stands) where you cannot even hear the commentators give their analysis of the previous play. 

In Des Moines, Iowa, Wells Fargo Banking has one of its service centers working nearly entirely from home. One service center in West Des Moines has nearly 10,000 employees that reported daily prior to the CoronaVirus pandemic. Today, most are working from home or have been laid off indefinitely. The same holds true for Principal Financial Group, another major banking, and insurance corporation. All have been hit hard financially speaking for their respective employees.

If you happened to work for Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, then you too were clobbered by COVID. Even professional football and basketball players were affected by this plague that we call a Chinese virus. And, of course, we all know that the virus found its way into the West Wing of the White House as well.

Politics, gaming, blue-collar, white-collar, sports, your local grocery store, pharmacy, hospital, and nearly every profession you can think of has been assaulted by a microscopic virus that has no odor or can even be seen. Yet this tiny virus has managed to bring the greatest nation on planet earth to her collective knees.

At this juncture in this pandemic, it no longer matters who did what, which President could have done a better job at controlling the outbreak, or even if it was controllable, to begin with. The fact of the matter is, it has left empty chairs at many of our dining room tables and empty beds at our retirement home communities.

The virus has punished Hollywood, the movie theater industry (you can’t even go to a movie now), and it has sent most of our nation’s children home to learn their subjects via a laptop computer on the kitchen table.

Needless to say, our grimmest of statics have soared, that being our suicide rate across our nation. 

With tens of millions still unable to work, home mortgages are on the brink for many Americans, and emptied bank accounts, how can anyone possibly find anything to be thankful for this Thanksgiving?

If one sits and visits with a Pastor about God, one of the interesting things the Clergyman will do is point to “how God will bring his children back into the fold who have strayed.” 

If you’re a Christian reader, think back on your life. Think back to the most trauma filled events of your life and remember how and what happened. Maybe it was a girlfriend dumping you, or maybe it was losing your wife or a child in a car accident. In any event, more often than not, this brought you to your knees in prayer. You may have been a soldier in a foxhole, and bombs are dropping all around you, and now you found yourself in prayer to God for the first time in your entire life.

In the end, God draws us closer to him through adversity.

The truth is when you have plenty of money, life is good, you’re playing with your new bass boat and hauling it to the lake with your new pickup truck; we don’t tend to pray as hard as we do when we are emotionally crushed from losing our jobs or a loved one. If you’re honest with yourself, you know that what I just said is true.

What is the most important thing we have as a child of God? It is not our children, spouse, bank account, bass boat, or favorite puppy. It is our relationship with God. God says in the Bible (Mark 8-36), “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” 

Philosophers, Atheist, nay-sayers will all say that we are “not a Christian nation.” I simply refer you to the “reasons” the pilgrims and Christians traveled to America in the first place. They risked their collective lives to be able to worship God in the fashion they wanted. Why? 

For two centuries, this nation put God first. Our currency even says, “In God We Trust.” So what happened? It took Satan two-hundred years, but we have finally fallen prey to our own selves. 

We worship money, fancy cars, NFL football, the nicest clothes, jewelry, and anything other than God. Oh, we say we worship God but do we really?

In the last fifty years, we have slaughtered over 60,000,000 of God’s children because these children were going to make life inconvenient. We have passed laws restricting the clergy from making any statements regarding “who we should vote for that practices God’s teachings in their lives.” We have legalized marriage between the same sexes, and we even have parades celebrating sexual deviancy. 

The sad truth is, our nation has all but become a near-totally hedonistic society, whose only interest lie in our own pleasure and desires. 

With all this said, where is the silver lining? Should we be thankful this Thanksgiving? Given all the pain our nation has been through this past year, should we truly be thankful? Our cities have burned, people have died needlessly, a pandemic has swept our country, and we have political chaos with an election that is still unsettled. What is there to be thankful for? 

EVERYTHING IS THE ANSWER!

God is bringing this nation to its knees to draw us back to him. He is doing this because, in the end, he still loves us. In reality, this is his nation. He created it, he helped build it, and he is trying to save it through our devotion to him. 

When you’re asking the blessing at your turkey dinner, remember to thank God for his rich blessings in the country. Tell him “thank you” for caring enough to want to draw us back to him. Because, in the end, it is only God that is truly important. Everything else goes away with time, but he and we live eternally, and that is all that actually matters.

By Ken Crow

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