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A Thankgiving Prayer by Rev. Peter Marshall
Posted by Randy | November 21, 2012

This Thanksgiving, I hope you are gathering with family and friends over some turkey to celebrate the blessings in our lives. I am particularly grateful this year for the health and safety of my loved ones and the brave men and women of our armed services overseas protecting our freedoms and our nation.  

I wanted to share this Thanksgiving Prayer by Dr. Peter Marshall, Chaplain of the U.S. Senate, delivered on the Senate floor on November 26, 1947. Despite national challenge and discord and the personal struggles that many Americans face this Thanksgiving, the spirit of this prayer still resonates today:

 

Our Father in Heaven,

If ever we had a cause to offer unto Thee our fervent thanks, surely it is now, on the Eve of our Thanksgiving Day, when we, the people of this Nation, are comfortable, well fed, well clad, and blessed with good things beyond our deserving. May gratitude, the rarest of all virtues, be the spirit of our observance.

Let not feasting, football, and festivity end in forgetfulness of God. May the desperate need of the rest of the world, and our own glorious heritage, remind us of the God who led our Fathers every step of the way by which they advanced to the character of an independent nation.

May the faith and conviction of George Washington be renewed in us as we remember his words:

...there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exits in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity; since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained...

For if we do not have the grace to thank Thee for all that we have and enjoy, how can we have the effrontery to seek Thy further blessings? God, give us grateful hearts. 

For Jesus' sake.

Amen. 

Dr. Peter Marshall, Chaplain 
From the United States Senate - November 26, 1947
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