382
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
November, 1934
"Giving Thanks
B y OLIVE WOODWARD OGG
Monroe, Iowa
~ r H W K $
T hanksgiving D ay is going to be different this year. My childhood and youth were spent in a New England town, although the town was located in this same Midwestern State of my present sojourn. It was a bit o f New England transplanted into Western soil. Until I grew up and went away from home, I never heard a pail called a bucket, or a spider profanely designated a skillet. Thanksgiving Day to us meant not primarily the close of the football season. The union service on Thanksgiving morning was as much a feature o f the day as were the turkey and the cranberry sauce. Often there was snow, perhaps the first big fall o f the season, around Thanks giving Day. I can feel now the healthy tingle o f cold and anticipation and appetite as we wallowed through drifting snow on our way home from church to the gathering o f the clan—with nearly always the addition of some guest who, far from home and kindred, was given a welcome at our board on this homing day. In the community where I now live, the union Thanks giving service has been relegated to the Wednesday evening
preceding the holiday and is perfunctorily attended by a meager handful o f the faithful. More than once, my own festive circle has been invaded by the football spirit, so that either dinner has been unduly hurried, or the circle has been broken. But that is not the reason why this year’s “ Thankful Day” is to be different; for, hard as the fact is to realize, this spot has been my home for many more years than were spent in the old homestead. “ The thoughts o f youth are long, long thoughts,” so that twenty years then seem to have been much longer in passing than thirty since. This is the first fall within my memory when there has been no “ Harvest Home.” I hope you can recall a harvest home service in the old village church. It was such a glad, bountiful time. I suppose the decorations o f autumn leaves, corn fodder, yellow pumpkins, and rosy-cheeked apples made it more or less a season of despair for the janitor, but we youngsters enjoyed it, and for us- down through all the years since, the Sixty-fifth Psalm has always been associated with rustling corn fodder and yellow pumpkins and sheaves o f golden grain brought into the meetinghouse, like the firstfruits waved before the Lord. This year, should our Lord tarry, will stand out unique in history and may be told to the generations following. In this particular corner o f a drought-scourged world, normally a veritable garden o f the Lord, there are no pumpkins at a ll; only a few dwarfed apples hang lonesome on the trees, the autumn leaves have no gorgeous colorings, and the stunted, wind-whipped, sun-scorched, worm- infested fodder is far from being a thing o f beauty coveted for purposes o f decoration. Beautiful, luxuriant blue- grass pastures such as it takes years to develop have been turned into a desolate, barren, dusty waste. A common sight to be seen upon the highways is a number o f truck- loads o f bony cattle being shipped to the north where rain was more abundant. Canneries once crowded to capacity storing up summer vegetables have been converted to gov ernment purposes salvaging the usable remnant o f herds sacrificed because o f the drought. One reads the first chapter o f the book o f Joel with amazement, so perfectly does it describe conditions here and now. The picture is complete, from the insect pests o f the first paragraph to the dying trees o f the closing one. The drought has cleaned us out o f everything but the promises o f God. W e live in the richest farming section o f this richest farming state in the Union, and everything is dead. Even the trees are dying. You would think, to drive through, that this was “ poor lander” territory such as you read o f in Ozark'stories. W e are just over the drought line; ten miles to the north, the greenness begins and increases as you go north. But God’s promises are not dried out nor sun-scorched. Thanksgiving Day this year will be different, but there will be a Thanksgiving Day. G iving T hanks for C hrist J esus Should an eager, waiting, wistful Bride be caught up to meet her Bridegroom in the air, it will o f course be
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