With the bleakness that permeates all around us as we enter the holiday season of 2020, I think that this a good time to rediscover the lost history of the first Thanksgiving in America. It took place near Jamestown, Virginia, on the heels of the almost unimaginable period of privation, hunger, and plague known as “The Starving Time”. When the ships arrived, they found only 60 of the original 500 settlers still alive. The sailors described them as “living skeletons”. Some had resorted to cannibalism, others simply dug their own graves and lay down in them to wait for death. But it was here, in a strange and hostile land, against the backdrop of enormous human suffering, facing an uncertain and hard future, that these men knelt in the Virginia dirt to pray.
This is beautiful. Thank you.