A Thanksgiving reminder, give thanks for the good, the bad, the ugly

By Norman Franklin

We are in the waning days of 2025. And we are at the threshold of celebrating the two biggest holidays of the year―Thanksgiving and Christmas. Both are foundational to our Christian worldview.

Christmas brings to us the love of God packaged as a little baby who is Christ our LORD. Our God, LORD, and King entered time and history under the humblest conditions―born in a stable, and laid in a bed of hay, which was a feeding trough for slobbering animals. Not the royal, grand entrance that the religious authorities expected. His parents were poor peasants in their social hierarchy. Their working poor social standing was the metric used to reject Him. The Messiah, the King, the Savior from the lineage of David would come to restore Israel without royal trappings. He would meet His divine destiny decades later. It was on an old rugged cross. It was bad, it was ugly, but through it we have redemption, and that’s good.

Thanksgiving, there is something about the holiday that brings families together. Maybe it’s the feast of food, perhaps it's the four-day weekend. It’s the most heavily traveled holiday of the year. Millions take to the airways, and highways to come home, fellowship with friends and family and give thanks for the blessings of life, for the journey, for the lessons from the experiences. This is what Americans do, we give thanks in everything. That is a directive from the Scriptures which are the doctrine, the declaration of our Christian faith.

An idiom comes to mind: America, with its polished identity, wants to “have its cake and eat it too.” We want to celebrate deliverance and gratitude without reckoning with the suffering woven into our history. 

The curated image of America in production for the semi quincentennial celebration will be a shallow identity of a nation without honest historical roots.  It begins in the education sector; the horrors of chattel slavery were reframed — it gave the enslaved market skills they employed in freedom. Textbook content and K-12 curricula are regulated, scrutinized and scrubbed of uncomfortable content. The horrors of slavery and the decimation of Native America are reframed in patriotic grandeur.

It denies the counsel of God who works all things according to His will. What that says to us is that there were moral and spiritual lessons in the horrors, the atrocities of the chattel slave system, and the genocide of the Native American Nation. However, the elitism of whiteness and wealth-power couched in spiritual doctrine, drove the nascent world power down the abyss of moral depravity. The denials, the erasure of uncomfortable history is confirmation of the guilt and shame the nation bears.

We ain't mad at you, America, we understand that you didn't commit the heinous atrocities of your ancestors, your fore parents did; what we don't appreciate is that you bask in the privileges wrought in systemic injustice but persist to deny the roots, the foundation, and the dynamic of the system that still plays out in our society and culture today.

In God we trust. We declare that in a statement on our currency. And the God we trust has given us a book of instructions. There is a New Testament Scripture in the Book of Ephesians, 5:20, “Always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Unless there is a misinterpretation of “for everything,” this great nation of Christians and Christian leaders must acknowledge the good, the bad, and the ugly, giving thanks to God for the moral lessons that make us better people.

They don’t seem to have grasped the moral reckoning; chattel slavery was the core vehicle for the nation’s economy for nearly three centuries; Black codes, Jim Crow Law, and state sanctioned segregation was the social norm for another century. It wasn’t a quirk of the South; it was a national strategy to suppress non-white agency. Rollbacks of gains in the social and political sectors, the virulent erasure of African American history, and the trampling underfoot of immigrant’s humanity signals the misread of Christian doctrine.

The holidays remind us of our need for humility, for gratitude, and the grace of redemption.  We celebrate a Savior whose suffering brought us freedom, while often refusing to face the suffering that built our nation. We give thanks for blessings but hesitate when gratitude requires truth.

Somewhere between the manger and the dinner table, between the cross and the family gathering, America has mastered the art of selective remembrance—embracing the comfort of tradition while avoiding the cost of honest reflection.