You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Matthew 5:43-44
We just celebrated Thanksgiving, here in the U.S. I love Thanksgiving. Who doesn’t love getting together with family and loved ones and eating a bunch of food? But, there is so much more to the holiday than that! It is so good for us to have a day when we pause to spend time with friends and family and reflect upon our many blessings. And, it is important that we remember the history behind Thanksgiving.
In our modern culture, Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, and the whole situation of their arrival to America gets a really bad rap. In focusing on all of the negative surrounding this event, we do a huge disservice, both to the brave people of the 1600s and to ourselves. The lessons we miss. . . .
The Mayflower sailed to America from England in 1620. The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock and set about trying to survive a harsh New England winter, the likes of which they had probably never encountered before. Not everyone who came over on the Mayflower was a Pilgrim coming here to escape religious persecution, but many of them were. Would you be brave enough to leave all you had ever known to come to a land about which little was known in order to worship as you saw fit?
Arriving in early winter, the Pilgrims were unable to disembark from the ship and had to stay onboard throughout the cold winter and many of them perished. Unprepared for the long hard winter ahead of them, nearly half of all the Pilgrims died from illness and hunger that first winter. When spring finally came, a Native American by the name of Tisquantum, or Squanto, as he is better known, befriended the Pilgrims and taught them basic farming technics which made it possible for the Pilgrims to survive.
Squanto had been captured, most likely as a young man, by the captain of a slaving ship where he was taken to Spain and sold into slavery. Somehow he was able to escape to England, where he learned English. Eventually Squanto joined the Newfoundland Company through which he was able to return home to America only to find that his whole village had been wiped out by disease during the time he had been gone. All of his family—gone. His way of life—gone. Forever. Sometime between his arrival back to America and the Pilgrim’s first spring, he was able to join the Wampanoag tribe where he served as an interpreter for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag chief, Massasoit.
Can you imagine that? The same “kind” of people who ripped you from your home, stole years of your life, and who are most likely responsible for the disease that killed your family, and what do you do? You show them grace. You love them. You help them. You make it possible for them to survive and thrive in this new world.
This story reminds me of the story of Joseph in Genesis who was sold by his brothers into slavery. When he meets his brothers again after more than 20 years of being apart he tells them, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”
Though it is important for us to always remember the travesties that have happened in our past, let us not forget what is even more important: the grace and forgiveness made possible for mankind to extend to each other through the grace that we have experienced from the Creator of the Universe when He sent His Son to die for us.
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