Consider the Goodness of the Earth
When I was a first-grader at Los Fresnos Elementary, Mrs. Pilsner made us sing "America the Beautiful" every morning after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Twenty-six years later, I can still sign the first verse of that song as easily as I can say the pledge.
I was struck by the imagery of that song even as a 6-year-old, likely because my mother, an English teacher, was forever explaining for me what words and phrases meant - so phrases like "amber waves of grain/for purple mountains' majesty/ across the fruited plain" were actually able to produce images in my mind that I can still see. Now that I am older, perhaps I see them more clearly.
The beauty of the natural world has always struck me to the very roots of my soul, and I do not believe it is only because I was raised out in the country. I begged my parents to let me go hiking in Colorado with my Uncle Jack and cousin Stephen the summer after my seventh-grade year, and they relented, and we tromped all over Gunnison National Forest and up into the Rocky Mountains, even above the timberline, and so a sharper picture of "purple mountains' majesty" came to me.
But this love I bear the natural world is not tied solely to my love for this nation. As a teenager in the mountains of Norway, the vast inland fjords and sheer, rocky drops of Jotunheimen, Land of Giants, etched broadly with snow banks and reindeer, I easily reaffirmed my devotion to God's creation.
In the Panamanian rainforest in Fort Sherman, Panama, where the Panama Canal meets the Caribbean Sea, I could marvel at the stunningly green biomass and howler monkeys, tree sloths hanging in the dense canopy and over on the beach were silverstreak barracuda swimming in pools. Panama was a place I could rejoice for rain on the beach and splash through streams running out from the green mass, clear through the sand and into the crystalline ocean.
Even in Iraq, where we patrolled on foot through the date palm thickets lining the west bank of the Euphrates River, where agriculture older than Abraham still thrived as it has since God taught man how to bring forth food from the ground, the beauty was perhaps the most striking of any place I've trodden. Perhaps it was due to the contrast of the desert against that vein of life, but the desert itself was not barren. Far from the ancient river were wadis, which are intermittent streams that fill in winter during the wet months, and ducks would land in colorful flights to feed and I would dream of trading my M-16A4 service rifle for my old beat up Mossberg 12 gauge.
One evening, while set up in security over a downed helicopter way out in the middle of the desert, a group of Bedouin shepherds came over the bluff, ghostly except for the bells of the lead sheep, walking toward the nearest wadi, which was still miles distant. One rode a donkey and everyone else walked, including the hundreds of sheep in the flock. There was no sign of anything at all denoting year or generation, much less century - just a timeless scene repeated over the millennia in cool desert evenings.
This deep bond I have with the earth whose mud and minerals and seawater went in to the body I bear, is something I consider when it is time to offer up thanks. Never be deceived: the land sustains you and everyone you love. Do not be deceived and think that we humans do not lord over it, because we do. Therefore, be stewards of it all. Don't be the steward of only your backyard. Lord over the land lovingly, because it has sustained you all these years and you have perhaps never thought to be thankful of that.
Rather than having said "Happy Thanksgiving" mindlessly, I chose instead to say, "Give Thanks Happily:" first and foremost for love, which transcends all things, and also for the earth to which we owe our continued sustenance and survival.
