At Thanksgiving, embracing the winds of change and increasing our faith

The chilly winds of change blowing across the global economic landscape this fall have tested our threadbare garments to the point of fraying.

Many of our fellow travelers find themselves losing hope that things will ever get any better. Many are disillusioned that President Obama was reelected, and yet the majority, which truly matters in presidential elections, are elated that the president will be given a second term to complete his mission.

While I was in that minority that didn't support the reelection of our president, I couldn't be prouder of who we are as Americans and that our freedom of choice is our most precious and sacred gift.

Some of us may feel at times as if there is no choice but to stop in our tracks and forsake ourselves to the fate of the dry and dusty bones littering the ground all around us. However, despite facing a bleak economic and jobless landscape at present, the human spirit always has a choice. Instead of giving up the ghost, we can choose to reaffirm our faith. In fact, surviving these trying times demands of us that we give thanks and praise.

Consider, if you will, that the improbable and unfathomably precious gift of our lives takes shape in a crucible of struggle. A single sperm cell, swimming along a foreign and hostile canal, pushes past the strewn corpses of millions of its fellow sojourners, to finally arrive at the ultimate prize: an unfertilized egg. Upon meeting the egg, a miraculous process ensues. The two cells combine and become instantly productive. They divide and multiply, and, in a matter of mere months, grow out of that singular union a complex and living being composed of hundreds of millions of cells. At length, we come to term. Again, a stark struggle occurs. Our mothers, in travail upon travail, bear the pain of ultimate sacrifice, approaching the very precipice of death to bring us forth, wailing and crying, into this world. Most of us have no memory of the shock and loss we experienced when we were evicted from the warm comfort of the womb to face the glaring sun for the first time. But out of such shock and awe springs life, and for that miracle alone we must give thanks and praise.

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